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The Italian Government just announced a plan of € 13 billion investments aimed at fostering the growth of the Industry 4.0 and set the ground of the next industrial revolution.
What is the Industry 4.0?
According to McKinsey, the Industry 4.0 can be defined “as the next phase in the digitization of the manufacturing sector, driven by four disruptions:
- the astonishing rise in data volumes, computational power, and connectivity, especially new low-power wide-area networks;
- the emergence of analytics and business-intelligence capabilities;
- new forms of human-machine interaction such as touch interfaces and augmented-reality systems; and
- improvements in transferring digital instructions to the physical world, such as advanced robotics and 3-D printing.”
This is also know as Industrial Internet of Things and is the area of the IoT with highest potentials of growth. Indeed, Accenture estimates the Industrial Internet of Things could add $ 14.2 trillion to the global economy by 2030.
However, companies don’t seem to be ready if it is considered that, according to McKinsey, only 30 percent of technology suppliers and 16 percent of manufacturers have an overall Industry 4.0 strategy in place, and just 24 percent have assigned clear responsibilities to implement it.
The Italia 4.0 Plan
In order to react to the lack of investments in the Industry 4.0 and encourage the growth, the Italian Government has just announced a plan that will see investments of € 13 billions in the next 3 years.
These investments will be performed by means of provision of different types of tax incentives which should lead to an increase in 2017 of investments by private companies in innovations of € 10 billion.
Such amount is higher than the investment of half a billion dollars planned by the US, € 10 billion planned by the French Government and € 1 billion planned by the German Government.
In order to enable the proper usage of such funds, very strict controls will be put in place which hopefully should avoid any misuse of public funds.
Is anything more necessary?
As previously discussed, there are too many IoT platforms which creates an inevitable obstacle to their interoperability. Is the market itself going to solve such deformation or laws forcing companies to enable interoperability are required?
Likewise, the question is whether machine to machine (M2M) communications shall be regulated or exemptions to telecom regulations shall be introduced. And indeed, this was one of the topics discussed by the Italian telecom regulator in its recent consultation on M2M.
Finally, is open data regulations necessary? If any company needs to develop its own data, the technological development might be delayed. A possible solution might be the introduction of open data regulations at least for activities performed with public funds or tax benefits.
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