AFIL - Lombardy Intelligent Factory Association
AFIL - Associazione Fabbrica Intelligente Lombardia

Project name

Vanguard Initiatives

The Vanguard Initiative New Growth through Smart Specialisation is an initiative that is driven by a political commitment of regions to use their smart specialisation strategy for boosting new growth through bottom-up entrepreneurial innovation and industrial renewal in European priority areas. It seeks to lead by example in developing interregional cooperation and multi-level governance for supporting clusters and regional eco-systems to focus on smart specialisations in priority areas for transforming and emerging industries. Vanguard regions wish to build the synergies and complementarities in smart specialisation strategies to boost world-class clusters and cluster networks, in particular through pilots and large scale demonstrators. These investments will strengthen the competitive capacity of Europe to lead in new industries for the future and develop lead-markets that offer solutions for our common challenges.

S34GROWTH - Enhancing policies through interregional cooperation: New industrial value chains for growth (INTERREG EUROPE) The main objective of the S34Growth project is to develop and improve existing regional policy instruments to facilitate interregional collaboration, which in turn will support the renewal of Europe’s industry and competitiveness. The project will engage ten European regions from 8 EU countries, as well as businesses, universities and other innovation actors from the regions, in innovative policy­learning, exchange of experience and co­-creation activities. S34Growth activities build on an innovative methodology (learn, connect, demonstrate, commercialise) identified within the Vanguard Initiative, which consists of regional stakeholders learning from each other, connecting the organisations and activities, and moving on to demonstration projects with the ultimate goal of improving commercialisation and product and service development processes.

CARE4TECH - Cross-sectoral Alliances for Smart Living

The CARE4TECH project reinforces alpine relevant technologies for smart living (e.g. health, mobility) by a powerful project group and stakeholders´ net. The main outputs expected from the project are the Alpine Space ATLAS, a map of leading cases and approaches classiffied into a knowledge base, a grouping of thematic excellences to cooperate, de-creation of 4 "Alpine Space Task Forces" which are Living Lab ecosystems supported by 4 Elichs and the setting of the Alpine Space Think Tank, a permanent policy and stakeholders platform.

SMARTSPACE - Smart manufacturing for Alpine Space SMEs

The project aims at triggering a process of manufacturing innovation, needed to remain competitive and overcome the challenges coming from emerging markets. SMART-SPACE leverages on digital technologies to be applied to the entire production chain: from production, to logistics and sales,  increasing the companies competitiveness and improving the quality and safety of both products and enterprises in order to turn them into 4.0 companies.

GREENOMED - Mediterranean Trans-regional cooperation for Green Manufacturing innovation

The project aims at testing and transferring a cooperation methodology, developed on the basis of Vanguard Initiative experience, to Mediterranean regions, considering their peculiarities. The cooperation methodology will be governed by clusters and it has been conceived for the design of interregional networks of pilots plants.

DIGIT-T - Digital Manufacturing Training

The Digit-T project is concived to create a training system that supports SMEs in tackling the chance toward Industry 4.0 in particular in understanding how to effectively implement Industry 4.0 solutions. This training system will include a free online interactive e-learning platform and an open access consultation book.

DIGI-FOF - The FOF Designer: Digital Design skills for factories of the future

ERICA Establishing Regional Cluster Agreement for sharing good practices in Advanced Manufacturing (TREC - Towards EU Regional Economic Convergence)  - Closed this progject aims at establishing an interregional cluster partnership strategy leaded by the main innovation and transference institutions (both clusters and technology centres) of each participating region (Catalonia, Lombardy, Nord-Pas de Calais and South Netherlands) in order to overcome current industry needs and constrains towards Advanced Manufacturing Smart Specialisation Strategy, with a special focus on Efficient and Sustainable Manufacturing (ESM).  This cluster partnership strategy will provide interregional collaboration for the improvement of the support to SMEs in innovation and transference in ESM through the conceptualisation of Joint Actions and their related investment plan; as well as the engagement of stakeholders to ERICA for provision of expert knowledge and sharing of good practices.

BEinCPPS: Business Experiments in Cyber Physical Production System (H2020-FoF-2015) - Closed It aims to integrate and experiment a CPS-oriented Future Internet-based machine-factory-cloud service platform firstly intensively in five selected Smart Specialization Strategy Vanguard regions (Lombardia in Italy, Euskadi in Spain, Baden Wuertemberg in Germany, Norte in Portugal, Rhone Alpes in France), afterwards extensively in all European regions, by involving local competence centers and manufacturing SMEs. The final aim of this Innovation Action is to dramatically improve the adoption of CPPSs all over Europe by means of the creation, nurturing and flourishing of CPSdriven regional innovation ecosystems, made of competence centers, manufacturing enterprises and IT SMEs

3DCentral - Catalyzing Smart Engineering and Rapid Prototyping  - Closed

The project aims at connecting “islands of innovation” to a stable network of regions for innovation. It´s focused on smart engineering & rapid prototyping where a substantial, current & future emerging market for CE cooperation partners is visible. Accordingly, the main objective is to develop, implement and anchor powerful, practicable, future robust Knowledge Axes for the CENTRAL Europe (KACE) cooperation area to tighten and boost the linkages and capacities amongst the relevant technology & innovation actors of smart engineering & rapid prototyping.

ADMA - European Advanced Manufacturing Support Centre

The European Commission frees € 2 million for the creation of a European Advanced Manufacturing Support Centre aimed at assisting European manufacturing SMEs in the adoption of advanced production technologies and systems, leveraging on a defined framework of benchmarking with the Factories of the Future (FoF) at European level.

During the next 3 years, the following activities will be carried out by the project partners:

• Development and testing of a coherent European methodology to help transform (SME) manufacturing companies into Factories of the Future.
• Promoting this methodology through communications and intensive training courses to a wide variety of European innovation partners.
• Setting up learning networks of Factory of the Future champions.
• Establishing and promoting a European Advanced Manufacturing Support Centre.
• Organising a European Factory of the Future Award event.