23 OCTOBER
09:00 Registration
09:30 Opening - Welcome and conference highlights
09:45 Inspiring speeches
10:30 Coffee break
11:00 First panel: Manufacturing Europe’s Prosperity
12:30 Lunch
13:30 Second panel: Manufacturing for Security and Defence for a sovereign Europe
15:00 Coffee break
15:30 Third panel: The role of public policies
17:00 Closing and farewell: The way forward
23 OCTOBER
09:00 Registration
09:30 Opening - Welcome and conference highlights
09:45 Inspiring speeches
10:30 Coffee break
11:00 First panel: Manufacturing Europe’s Prosperity
12:30 Lunch
13:30 Second panel: Manufacturing for Security and Defence for a sovereign Europe
15:00 Coffee break
15:30 Third panel: The role of public policies
17:00 Closing and farewell: The way forward
SPONSORS:
Confirmed speakers:
- Kai Peters – MANUFUTURE ETP/VDMA
Inspiring speeches:
- Maurizio Gattiglio (MANUFUTURE ETP Chairman): Looking ahead for the challenges
- Bianca Maria Colosimo (MANUFUTURE ETP – POLIMI): Perspectives from abroad
- Maria Cristina Russo, Director of the Prosperity Directorate in DG Research and Innovation – Recorded message
Rationale:
Europe’s prosperity highly depends on its capability to produce goods, not only services, in a competitive way. It’s critical to materialise innovation and circularity, to generate jobs and wealth and to ensure autonomy. Challenges such as quick time to market (scaling-up, fast response), sustainability (resources efficiency, circularity) and resilience (including robust and agile value/supply chains) are common to most sectors. And the key technologies to address them, particularly production, digital and materials technologies are mostly transversal and fundamental to build leadership and independence. This panel will address these topics and how Europe can take full advantage of the cross-cutting nature of both challenges and technologies, and deal with new demands/requirements regarding business models and people (including education and training), targeting a manufacturing fabric mostly composed by SMEs, an internal market that is not a single market and external markets with growing competition and barriers.
Confirmed speakers:
- Vincenzo Belletti (CECIMO)
- Jerneja Loncar (Good Tech Ventures)
- Miguel Henriques (JPM Group/PRODUTECH Cluster)
- Panos Stavropoulos (LMS)
- Carsten Schierenbeck (Head of Unit, Industrial transformation, DG RTD)
Moderator: Andrew Lynch (MANUFUTURE ETP/IMR)
Rationale:
Europe plans to significantly increase investments in Defence. To ensure independence/sovereignty and that its economy can also benefit from that effort, European defence industry needs an industrialization boost, increasing its capability to produce the most relevant products in large scale, competitive and sustainable plants. This can be achieved with the adoption of manufacturing processes, methods and technologies from other, more industrialized sectors, combined with the development of new, advanced production technologies (that can also be relevant for the other manufacturing sectors). This panel will explore these synergies between manufacturing and defence, highlighting the main challenges from the defence industry related their processes and the fundamental role manufacturing industry and related technologies in developing Europe’s defence capabilities in a solid, fast and competitive way.
Confirmed speakers:
- Renzo Tomellini (LEONARDO)
- Pascale Betinelli (THALES)
- Paolo Calefati (PRIMA ADDITIVE)
- Daryl John Powell (USN School of Business)
- Doris Schroecker (Head of Unit, Industrial Research, Strategy and Coordination, DG RTD)
- Dirk Peters (Senior Policy Officer, Defence Technologies, DEFIS.2)
Moderator: Riikka Virkkunen (MANUFUTURE/VTT)
Rationale:
It’s clear that Europe needs to invest more in R&D and Innovation but it’s also very important to do it in a more effective and efficient way. It’s necessary to overcome existing barriers and “silos” at European level, namely along the innovation cycle (pillars, programmes, etc.) and, at the same time tackle the existing fragmentation of the European innovation eco-system. Particularly in the case of advanced manufacturing technologies (as with other cross-cutting technologies), it’s necessary to speed-up time-to-market and to take full benefit of its characteristics, namely by promoting cross-fertilization.
Confirmed speakers:
- Cyril Robin-Champigneul (Deputy Head of Unit, Industrial Transformation, DG RTD)
- Herman Derache (EFFRA)
- Ciro Rocco (IAM-I)
- Valentina Ivanova (CEA)
- Wim De Kinderen (VANGUARD INITIATIVE/Brainport Development)
Moderator: Tullio Tolio (MANUFUTURE ETP/POLIMI)
The way forward:
- MANUFUTURE VISION 2050 (Simina Fulga-Beising – MANUFUTURE ETP – FhG)
- Concluding remarques (José Carlos Caldeira – MANUFUTURE ETP – INESC TEC)

