DIGITAL REGIONS, 'Regional policies adopting Industry 4.0 for their Digital Transformation', project partners are currently implementing their Regional Action Plans (RAP) to best adapt innovation policies to support the manufacturing sector as a result of the emergence of Industry 4.0. Today, we speak with Paulo Costa, Project Manager at CIEBI - Centro de Inovação Empresarial da Beira Interior (Portugal).
What is the main action of your Regional Action Plan?
Our Action Plan consists of a single action, which will be developed through the following activities: the diagnosis on digital skills training needs in micro and SMEs and development of training plan for the strengthening of workers' digital skills; and, the organisation of a workshop involving relevant players such as Clusters, players of PTCentroDiH’s consortium, business managers, academia, digital experts and other interested public and private sector organizations.
What will your organisation achieve with its implementation?
The overall objective regarding the Action Plan implementation is to influence and improve public policies at local and regional level to tackle challenges of digital transformation and lack of qualified staff and digital competences within the companies, with the main focus on micro, small and medium-sized enterprises. In order to achieve this objective, CIEBI will provide a report with a list of recommendations, based on the results of the activities developed within the Action Plan, to be delivered to the managing authority of Regional Operational Programme (ROP), so that the suggestions can be properly evaluated and CIEBI could effectively have an opportunity to improve the policy instrument for the programming period 2021-2027.
What are going to be the next steps during the following months of the project until the end of Phase 2?
The first step is to carry out a questionnaire to identify digital skills training needs and main challenges of micro and SMEs regarding the digital transformation and Industry 4.0. The questionnaire is already underway and will continue to run during the first quarter of 2023. Then, after completing the questionnaire addressed to companies, we plan to organize a workshop or webinar to analyze and discuss in more depth the results of the questionnaire and collect inputs from the speakers and participating players, in order to elaborate a report with a list of recommendations to be delivered to the managing authority of the policy instrument addressed.
