Engineering news
We are days away from our annual flagship event, Innovate 2016, which shines a spotlight on UK innovation. This year, we are consciously looking further ahead into the future. It is our job, at Innovate UK, to help businesses look ahead to opportunities and threats facing them into the longer-term. We understand this is difficult to do both in terms of time and resources but businesses that don’t do this will not survive or thrive.
So, what does the future of manufacturing hold? It doesn’t make sense to pre-dict the future of manufacturing in isolation. We need to think about the kinds of products and services that will need to be developed in the future and think about how the way we make them might need to change.
We need to think about what might be on the horizon for health, energy, transport, cities, for example. Sure, each of them will demand unique products and services but, if you look behind their features or unique selling points, they could be underpinned by the same sorts of manufacturing processes and technologies. They all need to be manufacturing-ready. And developments in manufacturing and materials will make new product forms and features possible. For example, we’ve yet to really see what additive manufacturing can really do with regards to new geometries and new types of product.
Without knowing exactly what those products and services will be, we need to consider the context for manufacturing more broadly.
Resource efficiency is a key requirement given the rising economic, environmental and social costs of inputs including energy, water and materials. The flexibility to meet the needs of more demanding customers and adopt new manufacturing and materials technologies and approaches will enable businesses to be competitive in the global economy.
Skills is a topic that also often comes up in any discussion about manufacturing of the future. As the UK government’s innovation agency, this is not central to our remit. However, innovation and skills are tightly coupled, both in terms of the generation of new ideas, their commercialisation and their adoption. We have to think about the skills needed for the future of manufacturing.
Whatever the exact manufacturing techniques, tools and machines we’ll be de-ploying in the future, they will be underpinned by digital technology: robotics, sensors, data analysis, simulation, etc. Where then, do the digital skills need to reside? We shouldn’t need manufacturers and operators to be computer scientists or programmers and vice versa.
As a colleague would say, manufacturers need enough digital know-how ‘to be dangerous’ – specifically to be an intelligent customer and push the state-of-the-art in digital and ICT to target manufacturing and its needs (as a computer scientist, I can say that – I don’t think digital innovators have tapped into the rich source of data and opportunities available in manufacturing).
So, Innovate 2016 will bring people together from across the economy to see the latest innovations and think about where we go next. I can’t wait. It is bound to get us all thinking. Here’s to the future.