Is the effort for manufacturing industry still worth it in 2021? Margins are getting thinner and thinner and the competition of far east countries can be crushing. Shall we find the motivation to keep struggling for western world?

Covid swept away the luddite fear of new technologies for sake of necessity, but there are quite big challenges ahead that the pandemic showed clearly and to Europe particularly.

Who remembers the No Logo movement in the early 2000s? That seems to have disappeared and brands are now more strong than ever. Will Covid-19 make them stronger?

Covid-19 has been compared to a war and wars usually bring together what some call “creative destruction”. Will it be the same for Covid-19 what technologies will be accelerated due to the current situation? Today we try to put an eye on the most unexpected field: agriculture

Bid Data and AI are driving the fight against the Covid-19 and that’s great, but there are also serious privacy issues about the States control over citizens. This may very well be excused as cause of major force, but brings serious risks of reductions of personal freedoms. Vigilance will be, as always, the price of keeping those freedoms.

Demonizing technology and particularly Social Networks has been very popular in the last years. All the “clever” people would talk bad about staring at the phone all time or communicating with the internet. In these days of quarantine due to Coronavirus, the possibility of being in touch with friends and parents from distance will make all the difference of the world to allow people to withstand stress, fear, anxiety and loneliness. DON’T BE AFRAID

The psychosis about coronavirus led me thinking about the opportunities to avoid stopping businesses to go on. For service industry this is rather easy, but for manufactoring it’s much more complicated, particularly for SMEs. Yet the sum of different technologies that are available now could unlock a new business model.

Cobots by definition will not steal your job, but they can help you a lot. This is just another technology with an extremely small cost of entry and that is worth to introduce inside the organization to be tested, understood and then exploited. They are such an easy instrument to program and learn to use that the advantage can be found for almost everyone. Remember: don’t be scared!

I didn’t though to come back to 3D printing so soon, but last week’s conference, organized by SPS Italia and Frankfurt Messe at the Politecnico di Milano, confirmed so many of my ideas about this technology that I wanted to freeze my impressions as soon as possible.

Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality. Two technologies often assimilated but extremely different, and only one of them has real industrial applications for the time being.