The influence of different innovation enablers on the adoption of Industry 4.0 by SMEs and large companies. : A comparative case study

Abstract: This research uses a comparison among seven different case studies to study how different innovation enablers leading to Industry 4.0 have different effect on different sized companies. To do so, the seven companies taking part in the study are divided between SMEs and large companies. In order to develop the framework which is then deployed to the companies in the form of a self-assessing questionnaire along with open questions, relevant literature from both the study of innovation adoption and Industry 4.0 is used. The findings of the study, which due to respondents’ availability is limited to Italy, suggest that two main groups of enablers are very important for SMEs and three group of enablers are relevant for large companies. While both groups value the decrease in the cost of operations and the government incentives currently available in Italy as important enablers, the large companies also consider the prior organisational readiness to adopt industry 4.0 as crucial. The study also finds that another dimension which would be interesting to investigate in order to better understand the adoption of innovation by industrial manufacturing companies regards the type of production performed by the company, identifying customised production as more open and ready to adopt Industry 4.0 on a large scale. The thesis has been developed in collaboration with Rohrbeck Heger GmbH along with a consulting project having a very similar objective.