The transition of regional innovation systems to Industry 4.0: the case of Basque Country and Catalonia

ABSTRACT

The work looks at how regions design policies to facilitate the transition of regional innovation systems to Industry 4.0. The research analyses how regional Industry 4.0 policies should take into account the integration of the position of the regional productive system into international supply chains, the games of legitimacy and power of the actors involved in the innovation system, the institutional structures that allow the exchange of knowledge on Industry 4.0. between the agents and the connection between the synthetic knowledge base (engineering driven) and the analytical knowledge base (science driven) of the region. Through a detailed case study of the background, structure and impact of Industry 4.0 in the Spanish regions of the Basque Country and Catalonia, the work demonstrates how it is not possible to define a policy of promoting Industry 4.0 that is generalizable to all regions and how each region will have to adapt the design and implementation of its Industry 4.0 policies to the specific characteristics of its regional innovation system. Therefore the replication of policies from other regions will not be an effective mechanism for promoting Industry 4.0 since the transition to Industry 4.0 is a very regional specific and diverse process.

KEYWORDS:

• Technological change
• Digital transformation
• institutions
• knowledge bases
• legitimacy
• innovation policy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Spain is the second largest car manufacturer in Europe and the eighth largest in the world. In Spain there are 17 automotive manufacturer factories with more than 1,000 Tier 1, 2 and 3 suppliers. This strength implies that the automotive sector makes up 10% of Spanish GDP and 19% of exports.

2 The presence in Spain of 8 Airbus plants (3 in Andalusia and 5 in the area near Madrid) involves a network of 2,000 local suppliers.

3 Basque Industry 4.0 is a programme designed to promote Industry 4.0. technology transfer from R&D public centres to Basque firms in Industry 4.0. The budget of the programme in 2019 was € 2.55 million, with an average subsidy of € 80,000 for typically small R&D projects with no more than € 200,000 budget. Joint proposals of two or more firms are very rare in this programme.

4 After realizing this problem, the Catalan government started to merge slowly small technology centres into larger centres, such as Eurecat.