Entrepreneurs 4.0

by Fabrizio Scovenna
ANIE Automazione President

In addition to training the technicians 4.0, to whom the second part of Calenda Plan has paid attention with tax credit on training costs, today we need entrepreneurs able to manage the heavy organizational and business changes that will lead to the creation of Enterprise 4.0.
Too often we are content to highlight the capabilities of medium-small companies and their districts: our pocket-sized multinationals. Unfortunately, statistics and research on Italian managerial skills do not see such an optimistic scenario. A study of the World Management Survey (data collected, from 2004 to 2014, on over 15,000 small and medium enterprises, of which over 600 Italian) indicates that, on a scale from 1 to 5, the score of our companies stops to 2.98. We are halfway between the USA (3.31) and Vietnam (2.61). The criteria used are the ability to set long-term goals, identify and measure effective KPIs, criteria for promotions, etc. The PIAAC (Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies) survey, which measures the skills of adults, places the linguistic and numerical skills of our entrepreneurs under the OECD average. Bankitalia states that, where there is family management, there is a greater risk of having worse management practices, less efficiency, less propensity and ability to innovate or internationalize. If we add the reluctance to use external managers and to assign them important delegations, we see a less bright scenario with companies a bit old, concentrated in the national market, not very innovative and not incentivized to grow.
The new globalized world moves in the opposite direction and needs to increasingly develop management skills to be able to adopt new technologies, to pursue the looming digital transformation, to choose effective strategies for the company, production processes, services or products. The changes, generated by the introduction of skills 4.0 and which will have to be promoted and governed by future leaders, will impact on all organizational levels and change the current business structure and culture. The new entrepreneur must be able to quickly learn these developments, generate consent and inclusion in the company so as to focus on the project idea that is being pursued, motivating the team and making it a participant in the undertaken mission. Without these capabilities the role of entrepreneur 4.0 will have little chance of success in a context with disruptive technological and social changes.