Digital Innovation for the Sustainability of Reshoring Strategies: A Literature Review

Recently, some critical events (e.g., the economic decline, the growing socio-ecologic bur- den, even more demanding customers, etc.) have led several companies to re-think their “shoring” decisions. Therefore, many of them decided to reshore manufacturing or to bring back home pro- duction activities previously offshored. This phenomenon represents one of the current imperatives for research. In fact, the location where manufacturing takes place has a massive influence on the sustainability of firms on a local and global level. Therefore, to better understand what makes reshoring strategies sustainable as well as to identify the drivers that can boost it, further research is still needed. The explorative nature of this paper recognizes some motivations or drivers for making reshoring strategies sustainable. To this end, a structured and narrative literature review has been conducted to grasp and describe the main motivations and implementation characteristics that can make reshoring decisions sustainable. The achieved results better define reshoring and the influence that some drivers, especially digital innovation, can play on the related strategies and on their sustainability. In doing so, this work is one of the first contributions that jointly approaches reshoring, sustainability, and digital innovation.