Industry 4.0 and Open Innovation: Evidence from a case study

The interest towards Industry 4.0 is growing since its inception. Its introduction has many impacts on the whole supply chain and requires companies to rethink the way they design and manage their supply chain. In particular, companies usually are not able to develop innovation by exclusively relying only on their internal resources. As a consequence, firms are increasingly collaborating with external stakeholders (i.e., suppliers, manufacturers and customers). This led to state that companies are more and more adopting an open innovation model. The objective of this paper is to investigate the topic of Industry 4.0 under an Open innovation lens. Specifically, based on a systematic literature review conducted on 50 papers, three thematic areas have been identified namely, innovation, smartness, sustainability. These trends have been confirmed by means of a multiple case study, involving three companies operating within the Italian food supply chain. The paper also provides suggestions for future research related to the fields.