One very special highlight of 2024 was the joint Bridges 5.0 / EUWIN Conference in Donostia-San Sebastián during the first week of October. Gipuzkoa province in the Basque Country has a long history of promoting workplace innovation, so this was the ideal venue for such an important event, and our thanks go to the hard-working Egoitz Pomares at Sinnergiak for making it happen.

The Conference programme included a diverse portfolio of plenary and workshop presentations including from researchers, policymakers and practitioners. You can see the programme here.

On the second day, Bridges 5.0 and SEISMEC hosted an interactive parallel session around the theme of Industry 5.0. It opened with a keynote presentation from Aimee Doole and Martin Welsh on Booth Welsh’s journey to Industry 5.0.

As part of the parallel session, project partners from Work Package 4 (AIT, TNO and IER/University of Warwick) organised and held an interactive workshop on trends: “The changing scene of Industry 5.0 and industrial practices”. The aim was to discuss, validate and supplement the central trends and developments in the context of industrial transformation. Previously, a list of trends had been identified by the project team that were then discussed with the members of the Bridges 5.0 Company Board. Bridges 5.0 stakeholders and conference visitors were also invited to participate in an online survey. The survey aimed to rank and comment on key trends in areas such as “social”, “values”, “environment”, “economy”, and “technology,” focusing on their relevance to company practices and employment/qualification.

You can find the Trends Report here.

“Thanks to all for joining! The response and interest in the workshop were overwhelming. The mood was very constructive and positive. The collected results and inputs are of high value for the project and for the upcoming development of Industry 5.0 scenarios and workforce skills for Industry 5.0.” Doris Schartinger (Austrian Institute of Technology, Austria); Wouter van Der Torre (TNO, Netherlands); Gerben Hulsegge (TNO, Netherlands); Peter Dickinson (IER/University of Warwick, UK); Wolfram Rhomberg (Austrian Institute of Technology, Austria).

The BRIDGES 5.0 team also gathered in an interactive workshop around the question of scaling up Industry 4.0 and 5.0 networks. Following the challenges and opportunities listed in a first workshop on this topic held online in August 2024, the second one aimed at listing the stakeholders, strategies and thematic pathways. The BRIDGES 5.0 Company Board and Stakeholder Board, as well as participants representing other projects, networks and actors, vividly wrote their thoughts about existing networks, thematic areas and the pressing topics on post-its. To some extent, their ideas reflected various calls to action, e.g. “disseminate best practices”, “build skills and training communities”, “support and connect SMEs” and “promote cooperation between academia, policy makers and companies”. Other inputs were clustered as various pressing topics, e.g. “employee engagement”, “leadership”, “skills”, and interestingly, to a lesser extent “the green transition” and “social inclusion”. The clusters clearly promote a call for action and express key areas, but also raise the question of integrating topics and of how to weigh and balance each focus area.

The second part of the workshop was dedicated to brainstorming very concrete actions to build-up such a network seeing its challenges in small groups. To start with, participants stressed to create accessible content for sharing knowledge. Important is that these should be tailored to different audiences (SMEs, employer representatives, employee representatives), and presented in various formats, such as short podcast, videos and courses. Together with showcases of best practices and benchmarking, the network is to be introduced in business schools, social partners, SMEs and many other types of organisation, time and again clearly demonstrating company benefits. Expanding Fresh Thinking Labs was discussed as a means to drive the Industry 5.0 Platform. An abundance of ideas!

You can download the workshop summary here.

“Thank you to everyone who took part for your great contributions! Michiel Bal, Alison Dunne & Karolien Lenaerts (KUL)

The Conference concluded with a call to scale up our collective efforts to support the wider dissemination of workplace innovation and human centric workplaces across Europe. This is a call to which both EUWIN and Bridges 5.0 are certainly responding.

At the end of the Conference, Steven Dhondt signed a co-operation agreement on behalf of Bridges 5.0 with EUWIN and WIN4SMEs, a consortium of vocational education providers, universities and business support organisations committed to the dissemination of workplace innovation to smaller companies.