Lessons Learned About EU-Japan Collaboration

An amazing collaboration between Japan & Europe has been completed. The EU-Japan AI project which focused on the collaboration and the exchange of knowledge regarding the adoption of AI in Manufacturing has been successfully completed! Based on the project results and collective experiences, a promotional brochure focused on lessons learned about EU-Japan collaboration has been produced, which you can download here.

Comparative Landscape of Manufacturing and Digitisation and AI Adoption – Japanese policymakers, SME support groups and SMEs have been slow to adopt digitisation in general, including Industry 4.0 and AI deployment compared to larger Japanese companies. As such there is scope for a wider collaboration between EU- and Japan-based groups of policymakers, SME support organizations, providers of specialized digitisation, robotics, AI systems suitable for manufacturing, and SMEs who could benefit from that support and successfully implement those systems.

Working Approaches and Communication Styles – EU and Japanese stakeholder groups are advised to concentrate on initial one-to-one discussions with suitable representative stakeholders rather than seeking to engage in a multi-stakeholder many-to-many exploration approach. Finally, as language issues also play a part, providing some level of simultaneous translation support in initial meetings and in distributed documents is a useful step.

Author: Coordinator, MINDS & SPARKS GmbH