Fueled by disruptive digital innovations, business leaders are challenged to move their companies to the next level by rapidly employing digital technologies such as IoT, robotics, additive manufacturing and artificial intelligence aligned with new capabilities and skills. Companies' digital strategy practically drives the roadmap of many departments and value activities. This phenomenon, also known as Industry 4.0 or Smart Manufacturing, is finding a growing interest at both practitioner and academic levels but needs deeper investigation. Indeed the existing literature on this topic is limited to technical and engineering viewpoints or dominated by consultancy reports and reviews of practitioners.
To address this gap, this research aims to deeply understand the dynamic capabilities needed by companies to successfully implement the digital transformation and obtain a competitive advantage. Therefore, it empirically investigates the factors that drive to develop digital manufacturing capabilities and evaluates their impact on organizational performance. A systematic literature review provided the basis for creating the partial-mediation model that guides this research. Next, the research instrument (an ad hoc questionnaire) will be developed. The specification of the construct domains and an initial set of items will be followed by an extensive purification process through expert review rounds, survey pre-tests and measurements refinement. Furthermore, an online survey will be carried out involving an adequate sample of manufacturing firms' executives operating in a wide range of industries. Based on the statistical analyses of the collected data, the questionnaire items and scales will be validated. Then, using a Partial-Least-Squares (PLS) approach, data will be used to test the model and find out whether the research hypotheses are supported. Finally, a comparison between perceptional and objective measures will be carried out to corroborate the results obtained.
Even though actual and potential advantages of digital manufacturing are remarkable, only a limited number of companies has already made rapid advances by developing higher dynamic and digital capabilities within a structured Digital Strategy, necessary to achieve a superior performance in these settings. According to Kiron et al. (2016) nearly 90% of digitally maturing organizations - companies in which digital technology has transformed processes, talent engagement, and business models - are integrating their digital strategy with the company's overall strategy. Managers in these companies are much more likely to believe that they are adequately preparing for the industry disruptions they anticipate arising from digital trends. Business leaders are challenged to move their companies to the next level, that of digital business transformation, rapidly employing disruptive digital technologies such as IoT, robotics, and artificial intelligence to create new ways of operating and growing businesses. On the contrary, although almost all the respondents to a recent global survey of managers and executives - conducted by MIT Sloan Management Review and Deloitte - stated that their industries will be disrupted by digital trends to a great or moderate extent, only 44% evaluated their organizations as adequately prepared for the disruptions to come. Moreover, PwC in their latest survey which polled 2,216 executives at companies with annual revenue of more than $500 million found that executives' confidence in their organization's digital abilities is actually at the lowest it has been since they started tracking it, a decade ago. Indeed, only 52 % of these executives rated their Digital IQ, a scale of digital-driven change, as strong. This result is 15 % lower than the year before. The investment in emerging technologies (as a percentage of total technology spending) grew just 1 % over the 10-year period, with executives looking to digital initiatives primarily to increase revenue and reduce costs, showing that less priority is being placed on innovating and implementing the latest technologies into their products (Puthiyamadam, 2017).
At the same time, despite the increasing interest in this topic, scholarly inquiry on the economic and managerial effects of the digital transformation of manufacturing, as well as its impact on business model innovation, has transpired in the literature only recently, resulting in a limited understanding of this phenomenon (Cautela et al., 2014; Despeisse et al., 2016; Ford et al., 2016; Schniederjans, 2017). The existing literature focusing on digital manufacturing suffers from a "double disease". First, it results dominated by consultancy reports and reviews of practitioners, which lack the methodological depth and the predictive power of serious research studies. Such publications contribute to the hype without offering much analytical substance.
Second, the majority of academic literature is characterized by technical publications, which, although highly valuable, focus on the engineering aspects of the technologies involved in this process and much less on the specific ways they are expected to disrupt the existing manufacturing and innovation practices, in terms of managerial strategies (Hahn et al., 2014).
All this suggests the need for more systematic studies focusing on the potential managerial opportunities associated with the emergence of a digital manufacturing ecosystem, to build up theoretical foundations in this area still largely in a nascent phase. Thus, these collective phenomena represent a research gap worth exploring.
In order to address this literature gap, the present research seeks to understand and empirically verify how this digital manufacturing ecosystem impacts the resources of the businesses operating in this sector and what are the specific capabilities that companies need to develop to obtain a competitive advantage in such a dynamic environment characterized by disruptive innovation. These results will contribute both to extend the literature in the research field of digital transformation and to provide manufacturing firms with important managerial insights. The key contributions provided will be as follows:
1. To shed light on the state of the art of the emerging literature concerning the digital transformation of manufacturing;
2. The conceptual model introduces a completely new construct in the literature: the digital manufacturing capabilities, that will be operationalized through the development and validation of the research instrument (ad hoc survey questionnaire). In addition, to the best of our knowledge, this is the first empirical study assessing the relationships among the variables hypothesized in the conceptual model in the context of the manufacturing sector;
3. To provide empirical evidence about the partial-mediation effects among the model variables, including additional control and contextual variables.