The competences for digital servitization: A survey on Italian based firms

Today’s world is changing faster than ever before. Recent research argues that digitalization offers a series of opportunities for companies, enabling servitization. The convergence of digitalization and servitization, namely digital servitization, is reshaping the working environment, guiding companies to develop new competences for workers. While this phenomenon is proving increasingly popular, there is limited specifications or empirical investigations that focus on the extent to which it is being adopted in practice. This research gap is addressed by exploring these competences on a conceptual and empirical basis using a structured framework. This article reports the results from a survey of 141 companies based in the Italian region, seeking to empirically investigate the competences that support digital servitization. The results show that although there is an increasing interest in practice by companies that are trying to fill in the gap between the competences’ importance and presence, supportive literature is rather limited. Finally, we identified the most critical competences for the examined sample, which are problem solving, data analysis and team working.