Watify Event – 31st Bled eConference | Digital Transformation: Meeting the Challenges

Watify Event at the Bled eConference 2018 will take place on Tuesday, June 19th, 2018.

Event will be hosted by Lydia Montandon, Research & Innovation Business Development Director from Atos, Spain.

Presenters and brief descriptions of presentations:

Nenad Šutanovac: Slovene ecosystem for digital transformation for SME’s and a SME case study
In the presentation a slovene ecosystem that supports digital transformation of companies, focused on SME’s, will be presented. Including its advantages and challenges. The ecosystem consists of regulatory environment, the infrastructure, but also the supporting government measures and initiatives. One case study of a succesfull digital transformation of SME company will be presented.

Tamara Hoegler: Can participatory methods and cross-sectoral collaboration stimulate the technological transformation of traditional SMEs? Lessons learned

Emilija Stojmenova Duh: FabLabs for smarter cities, villages and communities

Janez Povh: High performance computing: opportunities and barriers for SMEs
High performance computing is widely accepted as very important vehicle to drive on the domains that involve computational intensive processes. EU and several member states agreed on establishing EuroHPC Joint Undertaking to orchestrate large investments needed for development and procurement of new (exascale) supercomputers. These efforts are accompanied with several instruments facilitated to support research and business community to be ready for development and uptake of this technology.
In this talk, we will present three projects focused to this goals:
PRACE 5IP project, which aims at maintaining and further developing the integrated EU HPC infrastructure and bringing it closer to excellent science and industry;
EXDCI2, which aims at coordinating and supporting wide range of activities needed for convergence between Big Data and High Performance Computing communities;
InnoHPC, which aims at raising awareness and promoting High Performance Computing in the Danube region, especially among SMEs
All these projects pave path towards European science and industry, which will be driven by data and complex computations and will remain a global leader. For each of them we will present results obtained so far, future actions and the challenges that we have to address to reach the projects’ goals.

Christian Kittl: Digital Assistance Systems for the Industry 4.0: Developing Transformative Digital Services While Transforming One’s Own Business Model – A Case Study
Based on a real-life case it will be shown how EVOLARIS transformed itself from a mainly research project driven centre of excellence into an innovation company developing innovative services for the industry 4.0. In the session CEO Christian Kittl will present the opportunities that were opening up as a result of completed research projects in the domain of digital technologies, but also the rocky way of having to discard certain approaches and trying new ones due to lack of positive market response. The presentation will also show how EVOLARIS helped major industry players transform their business model towards industry 4.0 with digital assistance systems and point out the lessons learned which can be generalized as good practices when conducting a digital transformation project under similar conditions.

Harry Bouwmann: Digital transformation: SMEs phantom reality and/or playground for start ups
Blockchain, Ind 4.0 and other technologies are considered to be the newest upcoming technologies that will change the world. However, the reality of most SMEs is more mundane and their focus is on survival, market expansion, and growth. For most SMEs all these new emergent technologies are not a reality, they struggle with Internet, social media in their channel strategy, or start exploring the potential of Big Data. At the other hand start-ups are living the reality of the digital age: they design, explore, implement and use these new technologies. However the incubation time of this technologies are long and it will take time to become reality, even if big Industry conglomerates will be the driving force.

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