Innovative training design for Industry 4.0 Building the skills for the digital transition

Digital technologies are creating opportunities for companies embracing the transition to Industry 4.0, providing novel, powerful tools that promise to tremendously increase the efficiency and the efficacy of their processes. More than ever, the availability of data, computational power and connectivity promises to sustain people in their activities and decisions. To steer and manage these powerful tools though, requires novel and legacy competences and skills to achieve the full potential of technology, which may act as a booster to the process of creating those very skills. Unbiased managerial decisions, advanced organizational methods and innovative forms of training are some of the key elements that can enable organizations to achieve the highest benefit from these innovations in technology. This doctoral thesis aims at studying the relations between some of these elements. In a first section, a conceptual model was built, aiming at disentangling the effect of the form of training and its reliance on digital technological tools, on the reduction of cognitive biases and performance in tasks related to digital transformations. This paper has been accepted for publication in the book “Do machines dream of electric workers? Understanding the impact of digital technologies on organisations and innovation”, part of the series “Lecture Notes in Information Systems and Organisation (LNISO)”. The editors of the book are Luca Solari, Marcello Martinez, Alessio Maria Braccini, Alessandra Lazazzara. Secondly, the process of developing an innovative learning path for the creation of digital competences and skills, is analysed through a practice-based case study, to test and understand the efficacy of the deployment of an Agile and Stage-Gate hybrid organizational model on development process performance. Lastly, an experiment is presented, where a dynamic model for training transfer is tested through remotely delivered, innovative forms of training, to understand its efficacy in upskilling learners on the topics of Lean methodologies and digital manufacturing in the context of operations management.