BIFOCAlps

The BIFOCAlps project addresses a common challenge for many regions in the Alpine region: due to globalization, many manufacturing companies are not as competitive as desired in global markets. From a macro-economic point of view, this leads to increased unemployment, abandoned plants and remaining factories. On the other hand, the Alpine Space has a strong research and development sector and a strong specialization in Industry 4.0 and Factory of the Future (FoF) technologies. The main objective of BIFOCAlps is to foster collaboration and synergies between the main actors of the innovation system in the Alpine Space for a sustainable, smart and competitive development of the manufacturing value chain towards the Factory of the Future. The main outputs are (1) a map of the sector at transnational level to understand existing and potential good and best practices, technologies and competences along the value chain; (2) a validated methodology to improve the long-term sustainability of FoF through innovation and knowledge transfer between business, science and policy actors; and (3) guidelines for strategic actions to influence the policy agenda based on an impact indicator system to monitor and evaluate performance in line with S3 harmonization. Target groups of this project are stakeholders in the field of Industrie 4.0 who are involved in policy making, in the research field of the factory of the future and directly in the production value chain.