Digital Innovation Hubs

In order to maximise the impact of the experiments, each of them will be accompanied by a Digital Innovation Hub (DIH) which will provide help from proposal writing in the open calls to technical and business support for each use case. The DIGITbrain initial consortium included 6 DIHs with an overall European coverage; thus, reaching most of the European territory, and allowing the creation of new connections with surrounding manufacturing companies and DIH networks.

START 4.0 (Italy – Southern region):
START 4.0 is an association sponsored by the Italian Ministry of Economic Development, focusing on Industry 4.0. START 4.0 is a Public Private Partnership led by the Italian National Research Council (Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, CNR) with the goal of offering services concerning: digital strategy (evaluate the level of digitization as well as the technology potential of enterprises and SMEs); training (promotion and dissemination of competences related to Industry 4.0); and participation to RD&I collaborative projects foster the open innovation transition of enterprises and SMEs). START 4.0 has a network of 1000+ partners Europe-wide and among the associated entities, it is worth mentioning STAM, Confindustria DIH, the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT), ABB, and the University of Genoa.

ITAINNOVA - Centro de Innovación Digital de Aragón (Spain – South-Western region):
ITAINNOVA, the Aragon Digital Innovation Hub on HPC-Cloud and Cognitive Systems for Smart Manufacturing processes, Robotics and Logistics (Aragon DIH) is the Aragonese initiative that, within a framework of European cooperation, extends the strategy of Economic and Industrial Promotion of Aragon and the Intelligent Regional Strategy of Aragon towards the digitization of the industry. For this purpose, research institutions, competence centres, innovative companies and clusters are involved, as well as the business development agencies and the authorities in charge of supporting and defining the Aragon Industry Strategy 4.0 (AI4.0).

Irish Manufacturing Research (Ireland – North-Western region):
IMR are perfectly positioned to accelerate the design, development and uptake of advanced digital technologies by European industry, especially SMEs and mid-caps. IMR supports the manufacturing sector in Ireland, helping them use secure digital technologies in their production processes, products, and business. Formalised by industry and government in 2014, IMR is a small, agile, non-profit, independent research organisation at the heart of a regional ecosystem of partners on the periphery of Europe. IMR have two physical locations in Ireland (a Manufacturing Lab in Westmeath and an Innovation Centre in Dublin).

DIGIT (Denmark – Northern region):
DIGIT focuses on different kind of digitalisation technologies also in the manufacturing context. For instance, the Danish MADE projects virtually involves all Denmark’s manufacturing companies, where Aarhus University is leading the research in smart products and in relation to Digital Twins (https://www.made.dk/). Initial in-house manufacturing capabilities supporting MaaS has been started up. Research areas includes cyber-physical systems, machine learning, big data, IoT, cybersecurity, digital business models, and blockchains.

Innomine (Hungary – South-Eastern region):
Innomine is specialised in digital transformation, primarily in area of Industry 4.0 and has a cross-disciplinary team of professionally qualified experts, with research and consultancy expertise in management, technology and European funding. It was launched in 2016 as a separate legal entity with the support of innomine Group and many other stakeholders. innomine DIH has been selected in 2017 by EC within the Support and mentoring program for DIHs in new Member States programme and has completed it in 2018 with success. innomine DIH relates to other local policy initiatives and currently is leader of a Structural fund supported project to scale its DIH activities in the Southern Transdanubia region.

Smart Manufacturing DIH (Finland - North-Eastern region):
SMACC is hosted by State Research Centre VTT and Tampere University (TAU). SMACC is a cooperation platform for both industrial cooperative activities and scientific research activities. SMACC’s mission is to combine SMEfavourable (agile) operation model with scientific competence, disseminate enthusiasm, and encourage for innovations, forming an R&D ecosystem. SMACC has eight research areas: Autonomous machines and robots; Data based service innovations; Digital life-cycle management; Digital Twin; Engineering material science; Advanced digital and hybrid manufacturing; and Industrial robotics and production. Prototype manufacturing facilities are available in manufacturing lab for research purposes and pilot production: CNC-machines, 3D-printers, powder piloting services, laser equipment available, measurement equipment, material testing and design. Many manufacturing companies are involved in the network, which have manufacturing facilities and resources all around the Tampere region.

EGI Foundation:

EGI Foundation is a not-for-profit foundation established under the Dutch law to coordinate the EGI federation (abbreviated as EGI), an international collaboration that federates the digital capabilities, resources and expertise of national and international research communities in Europe and worldwide. The main goal is to empower researchers from all disciplines to collaborate and to carry out data and compute-intensive science and innovation. The EGI Foundation has participants and associated participants drawn from representatives of national e-infrastructure consortiums (NGIs), EIROs, ERICs, and other legal entities. These entities provide the physical resources and shared services that enable EGI to deliver, improve and innovate services for communities. EGI is supporting ‘grids’ of high-performance computing (HPC) and high-throughput computing (HTC) resources and is also ideally placed to integrate new Distributed Computing Infrastructures (DCIs) such as clouds, supercomputing networks and desktop grids. The EGI Foundation coordinates areas such as overseeing infrastructure operations, user community support, contact with technology providers, strategy and policy development, flagship events and dissemination of news and achievements. The EGI Foundation holds certifications in both ISO/IEC 9000 “Quality Management” and ISO/IEC 20000 “IT Service Management”. The EGI federation brings together more than 300 data centres worldwide and also includes the largest community cloud federation in Europe with 24 cloud providers across 12 European countries  offering IaaS cloud and storage services. EGI offering includes a federated IaaS cloud to run compute- or data-intensive tasks and host online services in virtual machines or docker containers on IT resources accessible via a uniform interface; high throughput data analysis to run compute-intensive tasks for producing and analysing large datasets and store/retrieve research data efficiently across multiple service providers; federated operations to manage service access and operations from heterogeneous distributed infrastructures and integrate resources from multiple independent providers with technologies, processes and expertise offered by EGI; consultancy for user-driven innovation to assess research computing needs and provide tailored solutions for advanced computing. EGI Foundation aims to help and support companies in the adoption / testing / validation of advanced computing technologies to become more competitive. They provide an open and innovative environment for experimentation, training, and networking which will help to increase innovation among the EGI Federation members. In DIGITbrain Project EGI will offer technical advice and consultancy to identify the best solutions to get industrial applications up and running on an integrated HPC and cloud platform, with dedicated support mechanisms tailored to users’ needs. This includes serving as a matchmaker for users and the appropriate service provider(s) across the EGI Federation and beyond.

MADE Competence Center Industry 4.0:

MADE - Competence Center Industry 4.0 is one of the 8 Italian Competence Centers selected by the Ministry of Economic Development in the National Industry 4.0 Plan.
MADE is a digital and sustainable factory that supports manufacturing companies on the path of digital transformation to Industry 4.0 by providing a wide range of knowledge, methods, and tools on digital technologies ranging from design to engineering, from the management of production and delivery, through to end-of-life management of the product.
MADE is a consortium of 49 partners including 44 companies (SMEs, large enterprises, users and suppliers of technology), 4 universities, and 1 public body. MADE DIH joined DIGITbrain as a consortium member of Experiment 14 and supports the Test Before Invest activities providing the technical use case (pilot line manufacturing small calipers and piston), technical knowledge, leading management and dissemination activities.