Resilience Capability and Successful Adoption of Digital Technologies: Two Case Studies

This chapter illustrates how resilience capability affects digital transformation by means of the case studies of two Italian middle-sized manufacturing companies that implemented important investments in digital technologies in recent years. Both companies show significant levels of resilience, which nevertheless result from different combinations of resilience drivers. One company displays a control-oriented model of resilience aimed at controlling change in the external environment, whereas the other one is characterized by a learning-oriented model of resilience intended for absorbing complexity. This difference reflects in the design and the execution of investments in digital technologies. The first company seems to perceive digitalization as a further technological innovation in line with a traditional pursuit of efficiency. In contrast, the other company frames digital technologies a solution to increase the integration of organizational processes, besides technical ones.