Workshop Digital Industrial B2B Platforms

In the race for Digitisation of Industry the high value-added industry of the EU is facing severe competition from the US, China and other parts of the world, moving from a uni-polar to a multi-polar world. Digital B2C platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Netflix, Amazon, Uber and AirBnB are everywhere today.

Digital Industrial B2B platforms are relatively new and are changing the manufacturing ecosystem by introducing new business roles and impacting others, based on underlying technologies and platforms for data exchange (e.g. AI, block chain, aggregators), which enable connectivity, data flows and data storage.

These platforms are to play an increasingly important role in integrating production (within companies - e.g. digital factories) and between companies, linking organisations along the value chain.

However, they also bring new questions and challenges like:

• How to avoid consolidation of Digital Industrial B2B platforms that leads to a “winner takes all” situation?
• How to determine what platforms and cloud owners can do with the data they obtain from the platform users?
• How to guide industrial contract agreements where fair retribution of data flows and a distributed governance model are at the core of the norm?

That requires the development of European policy and regulatory solutions. By doing so, potential risks can be mitigated and better market opportunities can be created.
Within this context, the partners of the Joint Institute for Innovation Policy will host a workshop on the 24th of October in Brussels where policy makers and knowledge institutes familiar with industrial B2B platforms will have the chance to discuss the current policy and user needs and how to address future challenges on this market.
During this workshop Max Lemke will officially receive the report called “Industrial B2B platforms: The race Europe cannot afford to lose”.

PROGRAMME

• Intro & strategic questions: Potential challenges and opportunities
• Pitches on solutions seen from different perspectives
• Discussion / brainstorm
• Handover report to & insights from Max Lemke

The workshop takes place from 13:30 - 16:30 hrs.

A position paper with main conclusions and discussions of the workshop will be published after the workshop.

The Joint Institute for Innovation Policy (JIIP) is a joint venture of four renowned Research and Technology Organisations (RTOs) from four different European countries: TNO (The Netherlands), VTT (Finland), Joanneum Research (Austria) and Tecnalia (Spain). JIIP provides intelligence to support policy-making with a focus on research and innovation policy.