The Race for the Top: International Comparative Empirical Results for the Logistics 4.0 Implementation Status in Italy and Germany

Logistics 4.0 (L4.0) received tremendous research attention in recent years due to high expectations for firms competitive positions (Wang and Sarkis 2021; Yang et al. 2021; Pan et al. 2021). Logistics is indeed a crucial element for the digital transition process, as the shift towards the L4.0 paradigm is necessary to achieve the full potential brought by the broader Industry 4.0 (I4.0) paradigm (Hofmann and Rüsch 2017). However, most of the existing research has focused primarily on various L4.0 technologies, with less contributions on implementation issues at firm-level and restricted availability on empirical data from a large sample of companies (Wang and Sarkis 2021). While evidence exists that many companies are still struggling to establish 4.0 practices in their production and logistics processes (e.g. Tortorella and Fettermann 2018; Masood and Sonntag 2020; Zheng et al. 2021), few researchers have extensively investigated L4.0 adoption rate and prerequisite and enablers of L4.0 adoption at firm-level (Mathauer and Hofmann 2019). Therefore, many interesting research questions arise like for example: Is it true that L4.0 adoption rate is low? What are the factors that might favor or hinder L4.0 adoption? Which roles do specific factors like technology or human actors play? The proposed paper answers these questions investigating L4.0 adoption defined as the five-step implementation model proposed by the Innovation Diffusion Theory according to Rogers and used for innovation diffusion worldwide (Rogers 2003). It also analyzes the impact of various technological, organizational, environmental and relational (TOER) factors (Tornatzky and Fleischer 1990; Mathauer and Hofmann 2019) for a successful adoption of L4.0. Based on a cross-national survey that planned to involve at least 200 company representatives from Germany and Italy including industry, retail and logistics firm of both countries, our results are expected to contribute to a better understanding of why some companies are more determined than others when it comes to implementing L4.0 practices. It is also offering a cross-country comparison, providing managers with instruments to support and drive the transition process. In addition, the research reported in the paper is intended to empirically test Rogers’ five-step-implementation model and TOER framework for its empirical application potential in the field of L4.0. Data collection is still ongoing, and will end at the end of May. So far, we collected 155 answers. Preliminary analysis shows evidence that technological factors might have the greatest impact on the adoption of L4.0.