Industrial Renaissance, Advanced Manufacturing and Servitization : An Introduction

One of the consequences of the steadily rise in globalisation that has taken place since the end of the crisis in the late 1970s and early 1980s has been a reduction in the weight of the industrial sector in developed economies, among others due to offshoring processes.At present, the concepts of Industry 4.0 and servitization provide ways to revitalize manufacturing activities in high labour cost countries and to provoke a kind of Industrial Renaissance. To understand how the uptake of these concepts may play out in practice, this monographic issue tackles presents three blocks of articles: the first looks at reindustrialisation processes from a conceptual, a macroeconomic and a spatial perspective; the second deals directly with advanced manufacturing and Industry 4.0 processes, and the third focuses on servitization processes among manifacturing firms