The Bicycle Industry in the new Global value Chains, the role of Innovation in the Bicycle Industry Architecture

Abstract

The aim of the dissertation is to describe how the Bicycle Industry can be an evolved representation of the Global Value Chain, explaining and analysing the Industry Architecture and investigating Italian companies’ reaction to the evolution of the Industry. Whether and how Italian firms, born as craft companies, deal with and how they could keep the leadership, in a sector which has reached a dimension increasingly global. The dissertation presents the relevant literature on Global Value Chain (GVC) and Industry Architecture, Product architecture and the role of innovation in the bicycle value chain and additive manufacturing in a sector where the human job can still be a game-changing factor; it describes the state of the art of the research on this field through quantitative analysis and qualitative description of its evolutions. The thesis of an industry globally-oriented is supported by global, European and Italian sales and production figures of the last decade, and furthermore by the results of the companies we looked at. We looked at different cases of Italian companies to identify common features of leading companies and key elements driving to market success. The aim is to understand reasons of changes in bicycle Industry Architecture: where the actions of the Value Chain primarily take place, who has the critical knowledge and how Italian leading firms are competing in a sector which is more and more global. The study is conducted through the qualitative analysis of case studies, show how the geography and organization of different stages, not only production but also pre-production phases such as design marketing or after-sales in Global Value Chain, contribute to lead firms’ innovation development. Evidence from the bicycle manufacturing industry suggests that lead firms’ innovation capabilities and product innovation cycle are shaped by a particular structure of the GVC wherein they operate influenced also by the nature of the product architecture.