Resilience and Digital Disruption: Regional Competition in the Age of Industry 4.0

The main aim of this book is to provide detailed evidence on the long-term resilience of Italian manufacturing, focusing, in particular, on the regions in the North-West (primary locus of Italy’s historical industrialization) and North-East (primary locus of industrialization in the 1980s and 1990s) of Italy. We study the case of the Piemonte region and also analyse the main trends in Lombardia, Emilia-Romagna, and Triveneto.1 Overall, this geographical macro-area accounts for about 27 million people, equivalent to the population in Benelux. The journey by train from Milano (capital city of Lombardia) takes 45 minutes to reach Torino (capital city of Piemonte), 60 minutes to reach Bologna (capital city of Emilia-Romagna), and 200 minutes to reach Venezia (capital city of Veneto). Milano and Torino can be considered an urban agglomeration (e.g. the Metropolitan Statistical Area of greater Boston which is about 110 km in diameter involves a mean work commute travel time of 45 minutes).
We introduce and discuss a set of indicators aimed at capturing industrial resilience in recent years. We examine the evolution of our main indicators from the mid-1990s, the period when Italian productivity began to lag behind that of Germany, the other main European exporter.
This book focuses, in particular, on how digital technologies (big data, computational power, algorithms, and the related fast developments in artificial intelligence) are shaping the development of a new generation of cyber-physical systems based on the convergence among robots, sensors, and 3D printing. Digital technologies are reshaping the division of labour within and between firms, with a reallocation of capital and labour towards new activities.