Towards New Skills in High Value Manufacturing - Accelerating the Diffusion of Innovation (Ecosystems) from Ideation to Market Saturation

As mentioned the proposed key deliverable of the Knowledge Alliance project will be a career framework focused on enabling individuals and organizations to accelerate the diffusion of innovations from ideation to market saturation for a wide range of products / services in high value manufacturing.

The career framework will consist of a modular development path that will follow the "Curriculum Guidelines for Key Enabling Technologies (KETs) and Advanced Manufacturing Technologies (AMT)" (http://skills4industry.eu/), will be made available based on the principles of Open Education (https://ec.europa.eu/jrc/en/open-education) and also be made available as a joint-accredited set of  certificate courses provided by participating institutes of higher education.

The European Commission's definition of open education is: "a way of carrying out education, often using digital technologies. Its aim is to widen access and participation to everyone by removing barriers and making learning accessible, abundant, and customisable for all. It offers multiple ways of teaching and learning, building and sharing knowledge. It also provides a variety of access routes to formal and non-formal education, and connects" (Opening up Education: A Support Framework for Higher Education Institutions, 2016).

The "Skills for Industry" initiative tackles the challenge "We are in the age of Fourth Industrial Revolution. New skills requirements are changing increasingly rapidly, and enterprises, especially SMEs, struggle to find the talent they need. How can education and training keep pace with this unprecedented level of change? How does a future-proof curriculum 4.0 look like?". It aims to contribute to increasing the quality and relevance of curricula and to promote stronger cooperation between industry, research, education and training organisations, to better align advanced manufacturing education and training with the needs of the new industrial age. The final report is due end of this year and will keep an eye on this being published.

The image reflects the holistic approach provided by the Skills for Industry effort which covers a broad spectrum of dimensions relevant to curriculum design and implementation: Strategy, Collaboration, Content, Learning environment, Delivery mechanisms, Assessment, Recognition and Quality.

Besides developing traditional learning content, making such available to project partners through an appropriate digital learning platform, piloting all content with the project partners and enabling a joint accredited suite of certificate courses offered by the higher education partners, the project will enable new forms of experiential learning through the simulation tool itself and a "do it yourself" stage play version of the innovation journey.

The learning offerings will also be designed for delivery at the levels of vocational training and education and on the job training for a wide spectrum of industry and SME organizations. The project will follow the intent of the Skills for Industry effort in that "The outcome of this initiative will play a prominent role in forming the EU policy making regarding the upskilling of the AMT workforce. The initiative aims to extract suggestions for anticipatory work, and specifically with regard to the role of policy makers in reskilling/upskilling the workforce, with a particular attention to the questions of what needs to be done, who can/should do it and how to fund it. The aim is to help likeminded people to find/co-develop solutions and to provide guidance for implementation. There is also a need to develop a mechanism for updating the curriculum guidelines on a regular basis, as well as for recommendations on scaling up existing best practice efforts." (http://skills4industry.eu/sites/default/files/2019-10/EA0319099ENN.en_.pdf)

If you are interested in learning more please visit us at www.innovation-web.eu, our LinkedIn Group at https://www.linkedin.com/groups/8779542/, our blog at https://www.innovation-web.eu/entov-hvm-blog, our Researchgate project page at https://www.researchgate.net/project/Open-European-Network-for-Enterprise-Innovation-in-High-Value-Manufacturing-ENTOV-HVM and our Facebook page at: https://www.facebook.com/groups/2014779865300180/. You can also follow us via Twitter: @owschwabe (#innovationweb) and the LinkedIn Group page https://www.linkedin.com/company/entov.