Knowledge Alliance for Upskilling Europe's SMEs to meet the challenges of Smart Engineering: The greatest challenge for today's Europe’s engineering economies is the so called smart industry, which is understood as the intelligent IT-based components and systems within all key areas of supply, production and distribution chains. This irreversible leap forward in industrial development is comparable with the introduction of steam power, electricity or basic IT at previous stages and is therefore known as the fourth industrial revolution.

Engineering enterprises must act quickly because they need to:

• build-up IT-controlled communication and interaction processes between various actors during the entire production and value chain

• develop and implement Cyber-Physical Systems

• redefine management and staff skills

• restructure work organisation and communication flow

Unfortunately, Europe’s enterprises are poorly prepared for these developments and lag behind their competitors in the USA and Asia. In particular SMEs, the backbone of Europe’s industry and still global leaders in many parts of the market, are under enormous pressure in order not to completely lose contact and their share of the market in the medium-term. Recently, some national initiatives have put smart industry on the agenda, however these are very generic, not interlinked with each other and provide little support to SMEs.

Therefore, the SMeART project has been initiated to build up sustainable cooperation between HEIs and engineering SMEs to ensure the successful transfer to smart industry by:

• Comparative description of major smart industry initiatives in all 28 member states, interlinking them through our project

• A survey on smart industry situation of engineering SMEs and profiling of clear areas for support and guidance by HEIs

• Development of a HEI business cooperation model for upskilling SMEs to meet the challenges of smart engineering

• Development of a sustainable learning, exchange and networking online portal to ensure further cooperation, development and lobbying.

 

For more information on the project please contact Simona Rataj at CCIS.