Rural Industry DIH

Overview

Rural Industry Digital Innovation Hub is a strong national development and support center, boosting digital transformation in sparsely populated areas. Typically these regions have strong SME and agricultural profile and many local success stories, which deserve to be highlighted. Too often, however, these entrepreneurs lack public interest, technological awareness, capital and workforce. They deserve up-to-date services for testing, good opportunities for project networks and supportive consultancy services for marketing, personnel training and productization. 

Rural Industry DIH aims at filling this gap, focusing on activities that help surrounding rural areas to grow according to their full potential. Digitalization of businesses is the core of activities, realized in research & innovation, education & training, technical consultation & support, internationalization, novel business models and funding. The actions of Rural Industry DIH are in line with the regional Smart Specialization Strategies, supporting the innovation potential of SMEs in the digital transformation. Oulu Region’s smart specialization strategy recognizes the digitalization as a cross-cutting theme in the support of the chosen spearhead industries. The strategy will be updated in 2020, recognizing better the importance of the development of rural industries, like agriculture and food industry and the responding actions to the climate change.

The digitalization challenges in the area have been identified, and DIH activities are having strong focus on them right from the beginning:

Companies having low digitalization level in current situation and not enough skills and resources to ramp it up alone. Especially SMEs with longer history and more aged leadership are typical cases of this kind. These companies will be helped by training and getting them aqcuainted with possibilities of digital modernization. Laboratories available added with feasibility studies gained in various projects and customer cases are a good help for
Companies needing help for more digital / Industry4.0 enhancements in their processes and products. In particular, there are a lot of SME manufacturing companies in the DIH region, which are lacking the needed expertize for next steps. Often there are punctual needs related to testing, analysis, robotization, new sensor solutions, IoT etc. DIH main actors have strong experience in this area and can provide test-before-invest activities in modern digital manufacturing enviroments in their labs, to help them go through demanding design phases, provide fast prototyping and POC services etc.
Companies needing help for their internal working processes such as e-commerce, agile working methods, quality raising, smart logistics, product information models and other new enhancements typical for the new digital age. Typically these include both working processes and supporting IT systems, both of which must be taken under active development. Many times these companies would be able to provide B2B products and services also in a globalized manner, but they need help for raising the needed skills and digital systems.Helping tools include not only training and consultation, but also networking and internationalization, in close connection with the previous system development processes.

Rural Industry DIH works in 3 neighboring NUTS3 regions, Oulu Region, Central Ostrobothnia and Ostrobothnia. The administrational center of Rural Industry DIH is located in Ylivieska campus in Oulu Region. The ecosystem consists of all administrational key actors of the area. The regional councils of all the three regions are committed to support Rural Industry DIH as well as ELY Centres for Economic Development, Transport and the Environment (representing Ministry of Economic Affairs and Employment of Finland). In addition, all the local sub-regional development agencies are included in the co-operational network.

All three regional competence centers are committed to operate DIH daily work.

Centria University of Applied Sciences acts as a leading partner of the Rural Industry DIH. Besides of having higher education in 3 campuses in the area, it's R&D division has a long record in research projects, having typically running 80 projects with about 6M€ annual budget. Centria has also over 30 years of nationally acclaimed experience in co-operation with rural companies, providing testing, prototyping and consultation services in different business areas with annual volume of 1,5M€. From over 100 people working for Centria R&D, over 40 are solely dedicated to digitalization themes and serving Rural Industry DIH with all their professional ambition.
The University of Oulu Kerttu Saalasti Institute is an international research institute with a mission to provide evidence based knowledge on micro-enterprises and their operating conditions. Our research theme is Operational Excellence of  Micro-Enterprises. Kerttu Saalasti Instituute provides knowledge from the prespectives of Micro-Entrepreneurship as well as Future Manufacturing Technologies and Regional Excellence that enable vitality and growth at the micro-enterprise level. Societal impact of research is our strength.  Kerttu Saalasti Institute provides knowledge to support development of enterprises and communities in order to generate sustainable growth.

Kokkola University Consortium Chydenius acts as a joint institution in Kokkola, carrying out teaching and research under the auspices of the universities of Jyväskylä, Oulu and Vaasa.. The Consortium’s areas of specialization mainly reflect those of its university partners: education, data processing, social sciences and regional studies, business and administration, natural sciences, and materials technology. The University Consortium offers both master’s and doctoral level education. In addition, it engages in scientific research, arranges a wide range of adult education courses, and accepts commissions from individuals and organizations within the region. Thus, its activities may be looked on as a modern attempt to combine the goals of educational, scientific, and regional policy under one roof.

These 3 competence centers share the responsibility of operational activities. All of them are non-profit academic institutions, and the aim of DIH is strictly non-commercial. Consortium behind these three main actors is composed of a comprehensive selection of regional economic development agencies, chambers of commerce, SME service organizations and companies. Together they form a substantial overall capability for strong regional impact. Commercial consortium members having profit organization status are not responsible of any operational work, as they have more a mentor-type role, also representing other commercial SME and MidCap field in the area. That way the needs and challenges of companies will be heard better in Rural Industry DIH.

In addition, the plan is to bind the new Rural Industry DIH immediately to the existing participation / collaboration networks of DIHs such as 5GTNF, Smart Manufacturing DIH and ROBOCOAST. Moreover, the dense ecosystem of international co-operation via S3 Agrifood, ERIAFF, ERRIN, European Industry associations and project consortiums are utilized in order to establish firm European-wide collaboration environment. Digital technologies.