The Future of Global Value Chains: Technological Innovations and Repositioning by Pietro Stilo

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This book examines how global value chains are being reshaped by technological innovation, geopolitical contestation, and changing managerial paradigms. It starts from the idea that global value chains are not simply technical arrangements for organizing production, but institutionalized configurations of power, governance, and inequality that structure patterns of trade, investment, and development. Thereafter, the book details how cross border production networks are reconfigured when digital technologies mature, trade rules fragment, and states and firms begin to treat interdependence as a strategic condition rather than as a purely economic fact. The first chapter reconstructs the historical formation and conceptual evolution of global value chains. It traces the shift from early notions of commodity chains to the global value chain paradigm, in which attention centres on the distribution of rents, the role of intangible assets, and the governance of inter firm relations. This chapter also reviews the quantitative turn in the field, emphasizing how multi region input-output tables and trade in value added indicators make visible the depth and structure of cross border fragmentation. Thereafter, it analyses how technological change, governance forms, and geography interact, and how successive crises, from the global financial crisis to the pandemic and the energy and security shocks of the 2020s, have revealed both the resilience and fragility of tightly coupled production systems. The second chapter situates global value chains within an increasingly contentious geopolitical environment. It develops the notion of strategic interdependence and shows how economic statecraft now operates through the instrumentalization of production networks, including tariffs, export controls, investment screening, and digital regulation. The chapter examines the fragmentation of trade governance into overlapping regimes and competing regulatory orders, and analyses how systemic rivalry, especially between major economies, reframes global value chains as levers of power and as targets of security policy. It discusses debates on reshoring, nearshoring, and friendshoring, arguing that emerging hybrid architectures of production reflect attempts to reconcile openness, resilience, and strategic autonomy rather than a simple deglobalization trend. The third chapter turns to innovations and management. It conceptualizes artificial intelligence as an infrastructural layer that permeates forecasting, coordination, and control, and explores the implications of data, algorithms, and platforms for value creation, intangible assets, and new forms of control along chains. It examines how digitalization and Industry 4.0 technologies transform supply chain management, organizational capabilities, and human capital, and how multi level governance, ESG norms, and due diligence obligations extend managerial responsibility beyond the firm’s boundaries. Finally, the last chapter grounds these arguments in sectoral analyses of automotive, aerospace, and electronics, with a particular focus on European actors. It shows how the green and digital transitions reconfigure industrial ecosystems, critical material dependencies, and governance challenges, and it uses European firms to illustrate how strategic repositioning unfolds within specific chains. Taken together, the book offers an integrated framework that connects historical and quantitative analysis, geopolitical economy, technological innovation studies, and sectoral political economy.