Regions and nations are more and more exposed to digital transformation. Traditional industries and companies are seriously challenged by newcomers and have to prepare digitalizing their business models in order to stay competitive. This new industrial transformation poses tremendous opportunities but also threats to companies and regions.

From 10th to 20st September the project “Macro Economic Reform/ Green Growth” from Vietnam conducted a Digital Discovery Tour Industry 4.0 for members of the Central Institute of Economic Management (CIEM). The tour was organized and designed by GIZ’s Academy for International Cooperation (AIZ) in cooperation with VDI/VDE Innovation + Technik in Stuttgart and focussed on Baden-Württemberg and Bavaria, two regions in Germany, which very successfully turned the challenges of digitalization into major competitive advantages.

Under the leadership of Dr. Nguyen Dinh Cung, President of CIEM and one of the most prominent economic reformers in Vietnam, the group looked at German best practice models in Industry 4.0. Of particular interest was to them state-of-the-art in digital production, cooperation between research and industry and effective promotion strategies for Industry 4.0. The tour is part of a structured exchange and capacity development process with policy makers in the area of economic and industrial policies. The experiences will flow into a National Strategy for Transformation towards Industry 4.0, which CIEM will present to the Vietnamese government at the end of the year.

As a kick off, Dr. Künzel from VDI/VDE presented the extensive landscape of intermediaries in Germany supporting SMEs to cope with industry 4.0 plus the interplay between regional and federal level support structures. This is an interesting topic for Vietnam, where the many regions often have very different strategies in business and industrial promotion.

The Allianz Industrie 4.0 and E-mobile BW in Stuttgart, were visited as agencies with cutting-edge support schemes for SMEs in digitalization. Also very relevant to the guests from Vietnam was the visit at the Hochschule for Textil und Design in Reutlingen, where Prof Michael Goretzky explained the close linkages among research and industry and the use of virtual reality in the high tech textile sector.

At the Virtual Dimension Center in Stuttgart- Fellbach the group took a deep dive into virtual and augmented reality and learned about the role of Virtual Reality in engineering. Then they experienced by themselves what it means, to check the proper functioning of a machine via virtual reality.

Remote steering systems for factories and innovative developments in digital production could be seen at the Faculty for Automation and IT Systems of the Technical University Munich.

Highlights of the tour were visits to IBM’s IoT Center, with the new programme Watson, to Audi and BMW in Munich, where the group could see cutting edge research on Industry 4.0 and got familiar with the use of artificial intelligence.

As a further step towards the National Strategy, CIEM will organize a conference in Hanoi in November. Several experts, which were met during the Digital Discovery Tour will then be invited to Hanoi to speak at this conference about success factors and effective promotion schemes - the beginning of a “beautiful friendship” on Industry 4.0!

28.09.2018 by Ricarda Meissner  

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