 Industry 4.0 technologies and circular economy: The mediating role of supply chain integrationEleonora Di Maria, Valentina De Marchi and Ambra Galeazzo Business Strategy and the Environment, 2022, vol. 31, issue 2, 619-632 Abstract: There is a great expectation that Industry 4.0 technologies will enable better circular economy (CE) results at firms. However, it is unclear how these technologies might contribute to CE. We hypothesize that Industry 4.0 technologies are positively related to the level of integration among actors along the supply chain and within the firm supply chain integration (SCI), which, in turn, explains superior CE results. By employing partial least square structural equation models on original survey data based on a sample of more than 1200 Italian manufacturing firms and almost 200 adopters, we find that disentangling for the type of technologies is essential to understanding both their direct and indirect role toward CE. Smart manufacturing technologies have a stronger impact on CE outcomes than data processing technologies; the mediating effect of SCI is verified for the former but not for the latter type, questioning the possibility for those technologies to support sustained CE performance in the long run. Date: 2022 Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:bstrat:v:31:y:2022:i:2:p:619-632 Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from Access Statistics for this article Business Strategy and the Environment is currently edited by Richard Welford More articles in Business Strategy and the Environment from Wiley Blackwell |
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