Industry 4.0 tools in innovative European firms: exploring their adoption and communication features through content analysis

Abstract Industry 4.0 is a popular topic in management literature, but it is also an interdisciplinary subject, maintaining a strong engineering connotation. Firm decision-making processes are more and more affected by Industry 4.0 which has introduced numerous tools that benefit and greatly support business activities. In this domain, the focus of this paper is the information made available to stakeholders on Industry 4.0 tools in use through a content analysis of the Annual Reports of the main European innovative firms (from the top ten of the Boston Consulting Group ranking). The analysis seeks to highlight how firms describe and qualify these tools in terms of impact (risk, strategy or environmental), the perspective used in illustrating them (managerial or engineering) as well as the temporal orientation of the information provided (present, past, future or none). Results show that innovative European firms pay attention and use these tools, in different ways and for different purposes. The paper has both theoretical and managerial implications. From a theoretical point of view, it contributes to study and further the literature on Industry 4.0 and its instruments, while from a managerial perspective, it gives a better understanding of how these innovative tools can be communicated to external stakeholders, especially investors.