Abstract
Over the past few decades, ‘digital technology’ has shaped the so-called Third Industrial Revolution—the first in the nineteenth century being characterized by steam and water, and the second at the beginning of the twentieth century being based on electricity and the emergence of mass production. In his book, The Fourth Industrial Revolution, Klaus Schwab, Founder and Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum, suggests that it will be a further step in human production based on a complete integration between the cyber and physical dimensions. The fourth revolution has the potential to transform not only the way we produce and distribute things but also the dynamics of customer engagement, value creation, management, and regulation (Kagermann et al., 2013; Schwab, 2017a, 2017b). An historical account of the origins, history, and impact of cybernetics is beyond the scope and goals of this contribution (Ampère, 1843; Wiener, 1948a, 1948b; Simon, 1968). However, the idea of the new cyber-physical revolution or ‘Industry 4.0’ has been introduced, inspired by the transformations made in German manufacturing (Kagermann et al., 2013). Industry 4.0 has also been described as digital manufacturing, industrial Internet, smart industry, and smart manufacturing (Hermann et al., 2016; Nuccio & Guerzoni, 2019).
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Notes
- 1.
The research combines proprietary firm-level databases with publicly available information from company press releases, news articles, peer-reviewed journals, and trade and industry reports.
- 2.
GPTs are technologies characterized by the potential of pervasive use in a wide range of sectors and are the ultimate trigger of technical-driven long-run growth (Bresnahan & Trajtenberg, 1995).
- 3.
Respectively, about 194,000 fewer firms and 800,000 fewer workers than before the onset of the last crisis (ISTAT, 2017).
- 4.
- 5.
Based on an analysis of the characteristics of technologies as described by the IPC system, the authors provide a conversion table mapping a set of key enabling technologies to the IPC codes. Robotics/automation technologies are identified by IPC codes: B03C, B06B 1/6, B06B 3/00, B07C, B23H, B23K, B23P, B23Q, B25J, G01D, G01F, G01H, G01L, G01M, G01P, G01Q, G05B, G05D, G05F, G05G, G06M, G07C, G08C, except for co-occurrence with sub-classes directly related to the manufacture of automobiles or electronics. Additional information, i.e. the list of IPC codes related to the manufacture of automobiles or electronics, is from Van Looy and Vereyen (2015).
- 6.
For both periods, we consider the first year for which data are available. Moreover, we calculate a three-year moving average to smooth annual fluctuations.
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Geuna, A., Guerzoni, M., Nuccio, M., Pammolli, F., Rungi, A. (2021). Digital Technologies and Industrial Transformations. In: Resilience and Digital Disruption. SpringerBriefs in Business. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85158-3_2
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