BACKGROUNDRapid technological change means we face a very real digital competence gap in the coming years—a period in which technological capabilities accelerate so swiftly that talent and knowledge can’t keep up. The competence gap will create friction, slowing realization of the benefits of digital transformation. Almost all EU countries are introducing schemes, offers, services aimed at reducing the competence gap but despite the EU goal of creating a common Digital Single Market, most of them are not connected, don’t know each other or have never thought about establishing any kind of cooperation scheme.OBJECTIVEThe DITA project wants to strengthen transnational cooperation among synergic training organizations and increase the mobility opportunities of trainees in the European digital industry scene by a) providing a transparent and useful overview of available training opportunities in the field of Digital Transformation, b) supporting trainees in identifying which available training opportunities may best fit to their needs and expectations, c) establishing permanent cooperation schemes among the identified training, programs and facilities, d) delivering and permanently maintaining an open but supervised tool (The Digital Industry Training Atlas) that will collect, connect and display synergic available training opportunities in Europe on digital transformation.TARGET GROUPSThe project has 2 main target groups: 1) it responds to the needs of todays and tomorrows professionals or graduates working for (or being potential candidates to work for) European small and medium sized enterprises, specifically the project addresses the needs of current or future managers and staff of almost all operational departments of a typical European SME; 2) vocational training organizations that would highly benefit from connecting to complementary organizations in their country as well as in other countries.The project will involve at least 100 end users (learners) during the teat phase and 160 during multiplier events plus 110 training organizations.NEEDS ADDRESSEDUnder this perspective the project allows a) learners to 1) have full and transparent access to available training paths in the field of digital transformation; 2) be facilitated and supported in identifying and choosing the most appropriate training path that would increase their competences and skills in the field of digital transformation;b) training organizations to increase the quality of their training offer by establishing international formal connections with complementary training organizations.EXPECTED RESULTSThe project’s expected results are to increase: 1) the general awareness level of the current and future European workforce about available training opportunities in the field of Digital Transformation; 2) the understanding of potential synergies among the identified training opportunities in the field of Digital Transformation; 3) learners’ mobility throughout Europe to benefit from the different and complementary offer of training programs in the field of Digital Transformation; 4) the internationalization strategies of life-long learning training organizations in the field of Digital Transformation.INTELLECTUAL OUTPUTS7 synergic and complementary project partners from 6 EU countries (IT, AT, DE, BE, PT and ES) representing the most relevant running European Industry 4.0 initiatives will cooperate to achieve these results by delivering 4 synergic IOs, namely 1) Digital Transformation & Competences in Europe: Available Training Facilities & Approaches; 2) Digital Transformation & Competences in Europe: Industry Relevant Training Case Studies and ideal synergies; 3) The Interactive EU Map of Digital Transformation Training Providers; 4) Cooperation Framework for a common Digital Transformation Training Arena.LONG TERM BENEFITAt the end of the project an interactive EU Map of available training options and their potential interconnections will be available for European exploitation via the Training Atlas. A long-term action plan, describing strategy and concrete action lines until the end of 2024, and concrete synergies with EU digitalization-oriented initiatives will guarantee its availability after the end of the project. European Learners and Training Organizations will benefit from it as well as all those programs and action lines foreseen and anchored to the Digital Single Market initiative..

BACKGROUND.Global competition has generated the need among all the enterprises, especially SMEs, to adjust their strategies for survival.As a result of T4 actions, the interviewed stakeholders complained of lack of skills and knowledge to allow companies have a dedicated person to facilitate the transfer of modern technologies, products and services so as to accelerate the development for survival on the market in the fight with big companies.It has so emerged that the proposed occupation, the Transnational Technology Transfer Manager, is mandatory for the development strategy. TTTM must possess, apart form the professional technical abilities, competences which should enable European harmonization (leadership, economic and legislative knowledge, ability to mediate between social groups with different cultures etc). OBJECTIVES.The general objective of T4 was to increase and upgrade skills and competences of European SMEs in the field of transnational technology transfer and accelerate public and private stakeholder organizations in increasing their responsiveness to SMEs skills needs. T4 aimed at 1)minding the gap between SMEs and transnational technology innovation processes;2)establishing a permanent, transparent, recognition oriented, evolving&multi-actor training mechanism which will allow to respond to the needs of SME's;3)increasing institutional capacity and awareness of responsible actors of industrial, technological and training policies about the role of transnational technology transfer for SMEs and extend cooperation between SMEs, Research, Service Providers and VET&Training System actors.TARGET GROUPS included:SMEs:managers,technical and administrative staff,consultants;Cluster Organizations:technical staff,consultants;R&D Centre / Universities:researchers,technical staff;Technology Parks and Business Development Centres: technical staff,consultants;Economic Development Bodies:policy officers,management,technical staff;VET and Higher Education:trainers, researchers, technical staff, administrative staff, learners.The directly involved target groups members was 650 units, but due to multiple information in various media channels, we consider that the number can be 1000.ACTIVITIES.In order to achieve the planned objectives, T4 has been structured so as to obtain the four IOs which were implemented by 7 complementary partners combining training, technology, outreach to SMEs and policy anchoring capacities.The 8 Work-packages were:WP1-Project Management;WP2-Quality Management;WP3-Evaluation and Risk Management;WP4-Dissemination and Exploitation;WP5-inding the GAP: SMEs& TTT (M2-M6) created a knowledge base about current successful practices which combined technology transfer&training methods to support these processes and further strengthen them; WP6-Mapping skills needs&Develop Competence Profile(M6-M11) which focused on mapping the competences of the TTTM; WP7(M11-M24) focused on producing the curriculum and in the development and testing of the TTTM Training Program;WP8(M20-M26) delivered 2 sets of final guidelines, one for policy levels and the second one for VET system & Innovation system actors and a template of Memorandum of Understanding in order to set up of a TTT Training Cooperation Network.RESULTS. Main project results can be summarized as follows:1)SMEs increased awareness level about technology transfer processes at transnational level;2)Training&Service Providers increased knowledge about how to simplify technology transfer processes;3)available training (including competence profile, training course structure, content and self-enrollment E-learning platform);4)increased capacity of the educational/training/service side to respond to educational/training needs with a more close to market and understandable language;5)participation of the governance level&VET System actors to the information and awareness raising initiatives;6)increased knowledge about how developed training can be transformed & readapted according to technological trends and SMEs needs(and how formal VET training course can be anchored to more situational learning settings based on SMEs daily operations);7)achieving of a good collaboration between partners;8)harmonization of know-how transfer between them and familiarity with cultural specifics of involved countries.The impact of our short-term activities was to raise awareness of the need to develop such a business within companies, creating a win-win collaboration. In a long terms perspective the project aims at creating a winning cooperation mechanism between training&educational system and European SMEs which will contribute to adopt transnational technology transfer as a means to accelerate growth and development.A major benefit consisted in observing the enthusiasm and satisfaction of the contacted stakeholders in finding the solution to solve the problem they had been struggling with for a long time, namely surviving on a market dominated by the big companies.

Industry 4.0 has now extended its focus to a broader set of technologies rather than just CPS, and to the most vital processes included in the product and production systems lifecycle, rather than just to production. In all the dialects where the Industry 4.0 language is spoken, Industrial Internet of Things, Additive Manufacturing and Robotics from the technology side and Mass Customization, Product-Service Systems and Sustainable Manufacturing from the business side always represent key cornerstones and top priority challenges. FASTEN “mission” is to develop, demonstrate, validate, and disseminate an integrated and modular framework for efficiently producing custom-designed products. More specifically, FASTEN will demonstrate an open and standardized framework to produce and deliver tailored-designed products, capable to run autonomously and deliver fast and low cost additive manufactured products. This will be achieved by effectively pairing digital integrated service/products to additive manufacturing processes, on top of tools for decentralizing decision-making and data interchange. Sophisticated software technologies for self-learning, self-optimizing, and advanced control will be applied to build a full connected additive manufacturing system. ThyssenKrupp and Embraer are two of these companies that must overcome challenges of this nature, in order to cope with an increasing demand diversity, products with shorter life cycles, and the need for supplying low volumes per order, requiring flexible solutions capable to effectively manufacture and deliver personalized products.

ARISE will make industrial HRI deployments simpler, cheaper, and more widespread in Europe by developing and demonstrating the concept of AgileHRI. The ARISE project envisions a near future which aligns with the principles of Industry 5.0, prioritising resilient, sustainable, and human-centric work environments. In such a future, companies recognise that investing in industrial human-robot interaction (HRI) is essential for achieving better short- and long-term goals, rather than a cost. Human-centric approaches surpass traditional technology-driven approaches, with technology serving people rather than the other way around. Industrial HRI establishes its position as a game-changing asset that enables seamless collaboration between humans and robots on complex tasks, allowing them to work together in shifts of any length. On its way to materialise such a vision, the ARISE project will i) address major application challenges from today’s industry, ii) develop human-centric solutions, tools, and software modules which expand the state-of-the-art in industrial HRI, and iii) deploy industrial HRI at scale in four testing and experimentation facilities and more than 25 workplaces across Europe (FSTP Projects). The ARISE project will address these challenges using cutting-edge open-source technologies from the European innovation ecosystem and will make a significant adavance on their state-of-the-art to position Europe globally at the forefront of industrial HRI. To that aim, the project will put the focus on the achievement of four major goals: (1) to increase the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of developing, deploying, and maintaining HRI solutions; (2) To develop open-source based reusabmodules which push industrial HRI beyond the SotA; (3) to demonstrate openness and agility as crucial enablers of truly valuable and sustainable HRI solutions; (4) to ensure impact a and sustainability through a critical mass of stakeholders & strong liaisons with ADRA ecosystem.

Manufacturing industry faces the challenges of driving competitiveness, resilience, sustainability and circularity in the context of a Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous environment. A VUCA world calls for new capabilities on the manufacturing systems demanding HUMANufacturing systems to evolve from industrial automation towards industrial autonomy. MaaS technologies still lack a solid foundation for more active resilience mechanisms that can respond with increased agility to more volatile and uncertainty scenarios. M4ESTRO envisions to create an end-to-end trustworthy and transparent platform for Manufacturing as a Service offering active and predictive resilience and timely preparedness to disruptive events. M4ESTRO will foster an interactive, collaborative, and dynamic ecosystem where these stakeholders will operate in a hyper-distributed way to manufacture products by providing and receiving services in a secure and trusted manner. It will offer response actions to foreseen risk based on the intrinsic network’s flexibility while offer preparedness to unforeseen risks based on the documented resilience to switch action plans To do so, M4ESTRO will focus on four (4) pillars, offering HW and SW components: Pillar 1: Resilient, transparent and flexible manufacturing processes in value chains. Pillar 2: Resilient equipment, AI and trusted data for adaptive manufacturing. Pillar 3: Resilient Simulations to the Industrial Metaverse for responsive manufacturing. Pillar 4: Human centred Manufacturing Resilience and Sustainability. The impact of M4ESTRO for the European Manufacturing industry, but also the society itself, can be summarised in the following (with a horizon of 4 years after project ends): (i) Process ramp-up time (>26%); (ii) OEE (>14%); (iii) Yield & CpK (>11% & >24%); (iv) Product cost reduction (>9%); (v) Cost per piece (>38%); (vi) Energy consumption (>26%); (vii) about 305 new jobs created and (viii) over 42.89 MEUR ROI for the consortium.