Industry 4.0 and servitisation: Regional patterns of 4.0 technological transformations in Europe

Servitisation is usually associated to Industry 4.0, as it is conceived as the bundling of products and services by manufacturing firms, with the aim to compete on the market. This paper, instead, separates out the two concepts, claiming that, notwithstanding certain areas of overlap, these transformations involve different actors, different sources of value creation and deeply affect the economy and society with differentiated spatial development patterns. The territorial dimension of these transformations has been so far neglected in the literature. Instead, where these technological transformations take place is important, since they are sources of new growth opportunities as well as of new interregional inequalities. This paper aims at conceptually providing an operational definition of the different technological transformations, and empirically identifying them in the European territory. On conceptual grounds, the paper elaborates on why and in which territorial contexts these transformations are most likely to take place and, on empirical grounds, the paper documents the existence of such transformations in European NUTS-2 region over the period 2008-2016.