Assuring the Future of Manufacturing

ManuFuture Village

Oct. 2008, entities from the Romania, Serbia, Republic of Moldova and Turkey both private and public, decided to form an Alliance for implementing and developing the ManuFuture ideas within a concept: ManuFuture Village^®.

ManuFuture^® is intended to be in the same time: a concept for implementation of ManuFuture Paradigm, a mechanism of action...

a way of developing the ManuFuture Paradigm.

It should address to: Companies, Research Institutes, Academia, Entities of each Member Country, accepting, believing and acting in the sense of preserving and developing the Manufacturing in Europe; South Eastern Europe as a meta-regional contribution to the long term solution of stability.

The MANUFUTURE mission The mission of MANUFUTURE is to propose a strategy based on research and innovation, capable of speeding up the rate of industrial transformation in Europe, securing high added value employment and winning a major share of world manufacturing output in the future knowledge-driven economy.

The vision of MANUFUTURE is long-term, but this should not be used as a justification to postpone the implementation.

The Manufacturing activity in Europe represents today approximately 22% of the EU GNP. It is estimated that in total 75% of the EU GDP and 70% of employment in Europe is related to manufacturing. This means that each job in manufacturing is linked to two jobs in manufacturing related services.

Innovating production

The traditional structure of manufacturing industries is constructed upon the three pillars of land, labor and capital. The challenge is to move towards a new structure, which can be described as "innovating production", founded on knowledge and capital. The transition will depend on adoption of new attitudes towards the continuous acquisition, deployment, protection and funding of new knowledge.

Change will occur in six main areas:

1. From resource-based to knowledge-based manufacture

In order to avoid competition based purely on production cost, European industry needs increasingly to concentrate its capabilities on high-added-value products and technologies offering a branded service range that fulfills worldwide customer requirements - not only in terms of product satisfaction, but also in meeting environmental and social expectations. Increasing the knowledge content of manufacturing will lead to more economical use of materials and  energy.

2. From linearity to complexity

To accommodate the changes foreseen in manufacturing processes, industrial enterprises must also re-examine their organizational structures. Former linear approaches to product and process renewal must be replaced by a "manufacturing engineering" strategy that simultaneously addresses all inter-related aspects.

3. From individual to system competition

Single companies working in isolation will not be able to respond to challenges of the magnitude that will arise in effecting such fundamental transformation-and even whole countries will find problems in mustering the necessary human and financial resources.

4.From mono-disciplinarity to trans-disciplinarity

Innovation processes centered on single competences will give way to multicompetence and multidisciplinary innovation in: microelectronics, nanotechnology and biotechnology.

5. From macro- to micro- to nano- scale

The electronics and biotechnology industries are already well advanced in merging materials design and manipulation with product processing. The progressive reduction of device dimensions, together with the added functions provided by knowledge-based materials, is permitting substantial savings to be made in resources use across the whole swathe of users sectors.

6. From top-down to bottom-up production

Over a longer timescale of, perhaps, 20 to 50 years, it is to be hoped that scientists will solve the problems of mimicking nature, making it possible to move from today's top-down methods to bottom-up manipulation of individual atoms and molecules.

ManuFuture Villageis the territory of applicable ManuFuture Paradigm, i.e. the set of rules, regulations, procedures set-up by the ManuFuture community as “the Strategic Intelligence”. This territory is a both real and virtual.

ManuFuture Village is our long-term solution, based on the ManuFuture Strategic Intelligence and practical efforts for the Economic Crisis.

ManuFuture Village is in the same time our qualified answer to the disappearance of common-sense in the mankind activities, and our reinforced action to recover the confidence and responsibility across Europe.