Abstract:

President von der Leyen highlighted in her political guidelines the need to unlock the potential of digital technologies for learning and teaching and to develop skills for all. The digitalisation of EU industries are a strategic imperative and further investment in the digitalisation of manufacturing SMEs, the backbone of the EU economy which bring innovative solutions to challenges like climate change, resource efficiency and social cohesion apart from helping spread this innovation through EU’s region.

The COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated the vulnerability of European industry and uncertainty about how economy recovery will look like. The challenge of SMES is not simply to be digital but to transform the company into a “Bionic organisation”, that is, a company which can combine technological, transversal and leadership achieving in turn more productive operations and greater innovation. The transition to a digitalized Europe must go hand in hand with the transition to a more economically, environmentally and socially sustainable Europe as guiding principle for the future.

In order to carry out this transformation and achieve this bionic state, it is necessary to rely on education and training, as people are always key in digitalisation processes, in addition to technology. It is important to foster knowledge, new skills and innovation to drive organisations towards progress. Under this context, the Erasmus + GIST project was born, whose main objective is to develop an innovative training material for SMEs to provide them the basic competences needed to reach this “Bionic Status”.

This training material is focused on companies in the furniture and related sectors, as the 4th Industrial revolution has not entered massively in this traditional manufacturing sectors because most part of their SMEs under-invests in R&D&I and have less capacity to change production processes and to find highly qualified personnel.

This paper presents how GIST will have a wide impact at local, regional, national and European level as the project will strengthen all the bionic key skills and competences through up/re-skilling of the current workers of traditional sectors, especially furniture (continuous VET) and students willing to focus on their professional career in such sectors (initial VET). GIST will not only focus on technical skills (4.0 key technologies); but it will also address the high lack of transversal skills under the current educational curricula for being creative, innovative, and entrepreneurial professional capable of advancing research and strengthening the addressed sector apart from having an open leadership.

For that purpose, three main activities are being implemented to reach the objective of the project:

First of all, the definition of a training path which encompasses a key study based on current knowledge, skills and qualifications regarding digital transformation and then, a Joint Curriculum to define the necessary learning outcomes and the methodology which cover previous identified gaps.

Secondly, the development of a training content addressing all the bionic topics, e.g., digital transformation, Industry 4.0, leadership, etc.

Finally, the design of a collaborative MOOC platform where all the content will be deployed and later on, tested by target users to check and assess the work done.

Keywords:

COVID-19, Bionic, Digital Transformation, Digitalisation, Industry 4.0, Innovation, Education, Leadership, Skills, SMEs, Traditional sectors, Furniture, VET.