Digital Transformation Strategies for Achieving Operational Excellence: a Cross-Country Evaluation

Abstract

The last decade, the manufacturing industry has been concerned with digital transformation as a new lever for competitiveness. Nevertheless, the industrial digital transformation remains an emerging topic, which is not well understood academically and in terms of its practical implications. Due to different contextual factors and national development policies, companies from different countries adopted different strategies for supporting it. These often led to peculiar effects on the companies’ operations. This paper is investigating how four large manufacturers - two from Italy and two from Denmark – are strategically addressing this agenda. The aim of this research is to offer a perspective on technology transformation in diverse contexts by studying the different digital transformation strategies adopted by these companies and discussing their dependencies on contextual factors.