• Digitalisation
• Industry 4.0
• Marble and ornamental stone sector
• Sustainability

This work is the final part of a Ph.D. course financed by the Regione Toscana with a scholarship called “Borsa Pegaso POR FSE TOSCANA 2014/2020” on the topic “Management of Industry 4.0 applications in Tuscan firms in the marble and ornamental stone sector”.
The dissertation's purpose is to identify drivers and determinants of technological innovation and sustainability and to evaluate the impact of digitalisation on the environmental, economic, and social sustainability of the firms.
The study is the first, to the best of knowledge author, to consider the stone industry as research setting for the examination of the relationship between digitalisation in the field of Industry 4.0 and sustainability.
Nowadays, digitalisation and sustainability are two of the most significant macro phenomena in business and society. Digitalisation is defined as a consistent part of the Industry 4.0 paradigm. It concerns the systemic and integrated exploitation of electronic and IT technologies such as artificial intelligence, robotics, the Internet of Things, autonomous vehicles, 3-D printing, nanotechnology, biotechnology, materials science, energy storage, and quantum computing.
The concept of sustainability also assumes a strategic position in the international debate about the preservation of the planet and the future of human society. Sustainable development plays a vital role in the management field too, considering, for example, the natural resource-based view theoretical framework and the corporate social responsibility discourse.
The relationship between digital transformation and sustainability is a topic of growing interest in management studies, so we choose to deepen the issue in our research. As indicated by the grant funder, the research setting is the Italian marble and ornamental stone industry, with a focus on Tuscany. The stone industry plays a leading role in the regional firms’ landscape, making a solid contribution to the national and regional economies. However, the stone firms faces several challenges in implementing their technological maturity and sustainable practices. Thus, the sector can be a compelling case to test the theoretical background empirically.
The dissertation is divided into four sections. The first section consists of an analysis of the literature about the macro-areas of digital innovation on the one hand and firm sustainability on the other, starting from the specific critical issues and developing a theoretical framework that establishes a link between these two fields of research. To do so, bibliometric analysis of 1126 peer reviewed management articles is proposed, with bibliographic coupling, thematic clustering, and citation analysis techniques. The review identified research gaps concerning the theoretical interpretative lens, i.e., the lack of contributions using the Resource Based View (RBV) theory, and governance forms, i.e., the presence of few contributions examining the role of family businesses in driving the relationship between technological innovation and sustainability.
A second chapter envisages the description of digital and sustainable patterns of Italian stone industry. In this chapter, an overview of the production process in the stone industry, of the role of Italy in the global market, and of the characteristics of the Tuscan stone district is given. From a theoretical point of view, we examined the contributions of the literature of regional economic agglomerations to determine the area's adherence to the criteria of industrial district, cluster, and entrepreneurial ecosystem. The focus on the Tuscan stone district revealed that the theoretical scheme of the aggregation of companies as a Marshallian industrial district still has reason to exist in the analysed context.
The third section presents a case study analysis of seven family firms operating in the Massa-Carrara province, one of the world's most important marble quarrying and processing areas. As in other industries, family ownership, governance and management are the most recurring business model for the stone sector; the role of this type of firms is significant but heterogeneous, which is why it is helpful to provide a comprehensive overview. The case studies were selected through numerous field investigations with market intermediaries and industry experts. The firms investigated were all visited in person due to the network of relationships I built up during my internship experience in an application context at the geological research centre “CGT Impresa Sociale Srl”. The chapter proposes a cross-case study matrix in which the examined firms are ranked according to their adherence to the principles of digitalisation and sustainability; it shows that stone firms are generally more technology-oriented than sustainable, and that digitalisation is a necessary sufficient condition for sustainability.
Finally, chapter 4 includes two quantitative empirical analyses with the Italian stone sector as a research context. Through the collection of primary data on the level of technological maturity and sustainable orientation of 46 marble companies, we performed a principal component analysis and a cluster analysis to determine the thematic groupings of firms in the sample according to their technological and sustainable dimensions. The statistical examinations were significant, and the cluster analysis helped to identify three clusters: a first cluster with high digitalisation and low-medium sustainability, a second cluster that comprises firms that perform well in both digitalisation and sustainability, and a third cluster with firms ranking low in both digitalisation and sustainability.
The second empirical study in chapter 4 consists of two logistic regression models built on a sample of 162 Italian stone quarrying and processing firms. The data came from secondary sources or were manually scraped from company websites. We run logistic regressions to test the impact of digital transformation on business sustainability and to verify the relationship between these two macro trends and the concepts analysed in chapters 2 and 3, namely district agglomeration and family businesses. In addition, we summarise, for the reference sample of 162 firms, the state funding categories provided by the Industry 4.0 plan, to verify the percentage of adhesion and the relationship with technological performance; companies in the stone sector have successfully embraced the tool, but the relationship of this variable with business digitalisation is not significant. The regression results show no significance in the relationship between technologies and sustainable practices but offer other interesting findings. First, being located in a specialised industrial district positively affects the technology adoption level. Second, being a family firm positively impacts the firm’s sustainability. Third, technology influences economic, environmental, and social dimensions in the case of family businesses.
The results of the research could lead to policy and managerial implications. Among them, we can mention the extension of the Industry 4.0 plan with the enlargement of the catchment area by facilitating the inclusion of SMEs; the implementation of business sustainability plans at the district level, exploiting the typical trust mechanisms existing among stakeholders; the strengthening of voluntary tools such as certification standards to speed up the sustainable transition of the stone industry. From an academic perspective, further research development with longitudinal data processing is desirable to capture digital and socio-environmental transition dynamics.