Human resource management and digitalization

"The volume addresses the central point of the current debate on the rela-tionship between innovation 4.0 and human resource management. The interesting contributions respond effectively to the question in the title and clearly show the need to build virtuous complementarity between Human Resource Management and Technological Innovation. [...] The content of the book addresses the crucial aspects of the current trends. The introductory general section deepens the organizational implications of Internet of Things and smart manufacturing. It underlines in a very appropriate way the necessity of relaunching the entrepreneurial spirit not only in start-ups and new ventures, but also within existing and well-established companies. Corporate entrepreneur-ship emerges as a key strategy for disseminating innovation, coupled with appropriate human capital training and development policies. The organizational change requires a radical transformation of HR departments that need to review their basic processes, taking into account how workers will interact with smarter machines. The innovation of HR models is central to both access to new technol-ogies and to evaluate how they are used and exploited. The volume deals with the specific practices that must be developed by combining a growing autonomy of people with the growing need for col-laboration between them. The empirical evidence presented and discussed shows that it is still unclear if one goes to greater standardization and work routinization rather than to greater autonomy and discretion of people in-volved. The emerging workplaces demand more and more versatility. On one side, people at work will be requested to have the ability to compile and analyse big data, to be able to effectively communicate what the data means, and to apply it to everyday business decisions. On the other, they will be requested to become proficient in using new collaboration ap-proaches and tools (Colbert, Yee, & George 2016). The contributions offer specific arguments on learning processes, new roles, new skills and competences required. It emerges that the relationship between individual learning and organ-izational learning becomes more complex in the context of innovation 4.0 and this requires a deep transformation of business training. This becomes even more crucial if one considers that the labour market is showing short-ages of new skills and competences and that the Italian university system shows significant delays in this regard. The digital transformation of HR processes can lead to a greater weakness of its role - to the extent that selection, training and control are only based on big data - rather than to develop a new centrality of HR depart-ment if people managers take on the risk of giving meaning to such data. The book is not aimed at providing all the answers, but it has the merit of raising the right questions to the attention of practitioners and scientific community." (Preface)