Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - FOCUS (Factory of the Future Clusters)

Teaser

Objectives The FOCUS project will build upon this carefully created fundament, and there has been taken together a community of five existing FoF clusters which will work toward the following four objectives. The two first objectives cover the current (“As-is”) situation...

Summary

Objectives
The FOCUS project will build upon this carefully created fundament, and there has been taken together a community of five existing FoF clusters which will work toward the following four objectives.

The two first objectives cover the current (“As-is”) situation for the clusters:
• Provide pro-active support to the projects in the participating clusters to disseminate the project’s tangible outcomes to raise the awareness and thus increasing on a short term the industrial exploitation and take-up.
• Elaborate on the common ground of the clusters to establish a European state-of-the-art and world-wide technology watch to inform the European manufacturing industry constantly while also formulating (with support from cluster specific top-ranked experts) the future FoF priorities based upon jointly identified business trends and market prospects.
The two last objectives cover the future (“To-be”) situation for the clusters:
• Deliver a proven model and associated methodology for effective cluster creation, execution and monitoring based upon the experience of the five participating clusters in FOCUS. This methodology will considerably ease the process of creating cluster thus maximizing the possibilities of increasing the impact of ‘exploiting’ cross-project synergies
• Deliver a model and associated methodology to ensure industrial exploitation and industrial take-up for future projects

The Focus Project is based on five existing FoF projcets clusters form ongoing or ended FoF projects.

The five cluster’s will report the achievement done so far and are the basic input for all the activities to the project.
The final outcome of Focus will be:
• FOCUS model for clustering and industrial exploitation known at relevant stakeholders
• Methodology for clustering
• Methodology for industrial exploitation & take-up
• Lesson learnt from the existing clusters

FOCUS Web page:

http://www.focusonfof.eu/

Work performed

A fix start date from the Commission was 1st of January 2015. Fourteen days later, 15.01.15, the PO and Commission arranged a Coordination Kick-off meeting for all the five CSA projects from the FoF7, 2014 call. The 26th and 27th of February the FOCUS project launched the Kick off meeting for in Brussels. The project has already developed and installed a SharePoint site FOCUS.

Beside creating the logo and branding of FOCUS the FOCUS website was made to provide a portal for the general public to understand what the FOCUS CSA is aiming at and to have access to the results generated by the consortium. The website www.focusonfof.eu provides and will provide all public dissemination activities of the FOCUS Consortium in general and the participating clusters in specific. Information sheets of the clusters, press releases, newsletters etc. can all be found on the website while their presence is also being disseminated via social media channels of the European Commission and EFFRA. This to ensure to have maximum exposure on the FOCUS activities is being accomplished and also being within the aim of a CSA. In the first year of our project, 16 press releases and four newsletters have been released while also resulting in moderate traffic to our project website. The different work packages has made newsletters, expert list, scheduled meetings and attended workshops for the project during the 1st period.


The 2nd physical consortium meeting took place in Bilbao 2-4th of September, arranged by Tecnalia and Ideko in cooperation. A brief discussion around the coming period with deliverables and expert workshop was the main content and a brainstorming of how to fill out the matrix for with FOCUS input forl the five CSA FoF07 integrated work. There has also been a 3 hour physical management meeting with WP an cluster leaders in Brussels the 15th of October to plan the forthcoming Expert workshop in Brussels in February 2016. Polimi has made a matrix of recommended experts together with the clusterleaders and the coordinator. The elected persons are contacted by the cluster leaders and just before Christmas the official invitation letters were sent by the Coordinator.

Beside this the project has had regular skype management meetings every first Monday in the month. The dissemination manager (WP3) has arranged similar meeting every 3rd Monday until August 2015. As activities in WP3 were running smoothly and on the other hand a regular contact between WP and cluster leaders was needed it was decided to change the WP3 meetings to a monthly combined cluster leader/WP leaders meeting.

Final results

The exploitation activitieshave been split in two sub activities:
- Identify together with the cluster leaders a list of reference people to collect exploitable results for each cluster/project.
- Reference people will assist cluster leaders to:
o collect exploitable results be reported to exploitation manager
o list on timeline base the exploitation results planned according to each project
o establish active partners working group on FoF priorities definition

In line with the approach, all reference people who are able to provide exploitable results coming from the projects as participating in the clusters as represented in FOCUS have been identified in the period. In addition all exploitable results have been collected and are presented in an organized way via the cluster specific press releases as can be found on our website and as announced via our social media channels to raise awareness. These outcomes are being used to feed into both WP1 activities on the Expert Workshops to start defining the FoF-priorities which is to be finalized by M18.
This results are also the main exploitable results for FOCUS.



FOCUS plan for exploitation and dissemination:
The main content in the plan is following:
• Methodology for industrial exploitation & take-up
• Methodology for Cluster creation
• Roadmaps for the five industrial aspects within FOCUS
o Zero Defect Manufacturing
o Maintenance and services
o High Micro Manufacturing
o Green Factory
o Robotics
The Roadmaps are distributed all over Europe and both with help from EFRRA and Manufuture. The Roadmaps are also an important base for the establishment of the Manufuture Zero Defect Manufacturing.
The Methodology results were introduced to the 4ZDM cluster when the five new ZDM 2016 FoF project. The 4ZDM cluster will use the FOCUS results in the further cluster work. The Methodology has been presented in EFFRA events and is applicable also for other clusters. The Focus Methodology has also be presented at national and regional levels.

Website & more info

More info: http://www.focusonfof.eu/.