Ricerc@Sapienza

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.