Since the rise of emerging economies in the global scenario, it has been critical to better understand the role of knowledge and innovation played in this process. We focus on researching not only how knowledge and innovation is managed and generated in emerging markets, but also how traditionally they learned from advanced economies to enhance their innovation capability, and recently the reverse innovation process about how this innovation capability in emerging markets affects and is transferred to advanced economies. With this purpose, the proposed KITFEM research project aims to study the management of knowledge and innovation in, to and from emerging markets, with special emphasis on its impacts on the EU. With the proposed secondments among fifteen partners in nine countries around the world in four continents, between partners from academic sector and non-academic sector, KITFEM combines research on the issue of knowledge and innovation between emerging markets and European enterprises, and knowledge sharing and dissemination around the world to enhance the impact of European innovation. Involving 54 researchers, managers, tech, and administrative staff, KITFEM consists of seven work packages to foster the interaction between scientific community and other stakeholders such as institutions, industries, business, and general civil society, to ensure the popular interests and engagement of the researched topic. In such a way, one work package is dedicated to project management and internal communication and another to external communication, dissemination and outreach activities. Five work packages focus on research, training and dissemination, at multiple levels: Institutional-industrial-organizational-individual. With the designed project structure and competitive capability of the fifteen partners involved, KITFEM is expected to generate high impact in the globe, both in term of research excellence and societal engagement.

In 2019, SMEs accounted for 99.8% of all enterprises in the EU-28 non-financial business sector and accounted for the majority of the increase in value added (60%) – EU Annual Report on SMEs, (November 2019). In the last years, the EC acknowledged that a number of areas require immediate action at EU level to ensure that: (1) SMEs will increase Europe’s competitiveness in the AI landscape leaving no SME behind (2) New technologies and AI-based product, processes and services are based on European ethical values (3) SMEs get fast, trusted and secure links to data assets, AI methods and tools that can be used expediently and build on digital sovereignty. DIHs (Digital Innovation Hubs) are a fundamental European instrument that has emerged over the last decade to address these limitations and encourage the uptake of AI across the economy. We simply need to establish the most needed link between the DIH engine and the AI4EU service platform power to ignite a virtuous cross-sectorial European economy of intelligence for SMEs at scale; precisely the SME-friendly AI vision that DIH4AI aims at fulfilling. The DIH4AI project aims at building a network of AI-on-demand innovation and collaboration platforms, supporting joint development and provision of ecosystem-business-technology-transformation services through a sustainable network of regional DIHs specialized in AI and targeting local SMEs and local tech governmental agencies. The DIH4AI regional platforms are by design interoperable with the pan-EU AI4EU platform thanks to an interoperability framework operating at Portal, Data and Cloud levels, allowing SME-DIH-EU virtuous bi-directional collaborations at the level of shared AI resources, AI-oriented standard data models and ontologies, AI ready FAIR datasets, AI-driven user interaction and services (SAAS) and AI-compatible advanced computation facilities (PAAS and IAAS).

To meet requirements of mass customisation, the manufacturers of machines and equipment for production of mass customised products need powerful engineering environments to allow for multi-directional exchange of knowledge between product design, service design and manufacturing, as well as customers and other relevant organisations across the value chain, distributed all over the globe. Specifically they need feedback from their business customers to whom they sell their equipment, as well as from the final-product customers. Cloud Manufacturing (CMfg) provides new possibilities for collaborative design of product-services within such distributed enterprise, easily adaptable to highly dynamically changing conditions under which enterprises are developing and manufacturing their product-services. On the other hand, tremendous experiences in social software solutions offer new opportunities for enterprises to capture and share experienced based knowledge among all actors across the value chain. Such enormous amount of knowledge to be gathered and shared under dynamically changing conditions, with wide spectrum of actors involved, having different expertise and working conditions/cultures, ask for effective context sensitive solutions for knowledge capturing and analysis. The objective of DIVERSITY is to create a new product-service engineering environment based on a combination of CMfg, PDM/PLM and social software, as well as a set of software tools to support real time sharing of knowledge among various actors, from the designer up to the customer, aimed at small and medium sized companies producing machines/equipment for mass product manufacturers. A new methodology for concurrent collaborative product-service design applying lean based product design paradigm will be developed. Three manufacturing companies, delivering machines/equipment in three different mass production sectors, will drive the project development.