Collaboration is a key to innovation

I was one of about fifty experts invited to the acatech symposium „Collaboration as the key to innovation“ that was held in the premises of the Federal Ministry of Economics and Energy in Berlin September 5th 2017. The key question behind the acatech project InnoKey 4.0 presented during the symposium was how innovative technologies and processes of industry 4.0 can be established more rapidly. The study focused on automotive logistics. In a nutshell, it was concluded that an early cross-company collaboration accelerates innovation cycles and that research groups need more freedom of decision for this collaboration.