MecaTech: Mechanical engineering is undergoing a major mutation with the explosion of digital and industry 4.0 Interview with Mr Anthony VAN PUTTE, Managing director of the MecaTech competitiveness cluster
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What are the strategic directions the Cluster focuses on? MecaTech Competitiveness Cluster’s area of activity is mechanical engineering, which is undergoing a major mutation with the explosion of digital and industry 4.0. This transverse field supports product and machine development in almost all markets, with the MecaTech Competitiveness Cluster’s priorities being energy, environment, transportation, defense and security, construction, medicine, and industry.
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hat is the MecaTech Competitiveness Cluster’s ambition? Our aim is to help create a Wallonia that is committed to meeting today’s environmental, health, and mobility challenges without forsaking its industrial fabric; one that allows the creation of fair and meaningful jobs.
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And its mission? Our mission is to support corporate transformation to create the jobs and business of the future by engineering and carrying out innovative projects with international ambitions. The cluster’s aim is to help develop technology to serve human beings and to support the companies and organizations that show a desire to create value in and for Wallonia.
The Cluster has defined 5 main strategic orientations: • Need to be present on the markets for finished products, machines and various equipment for consumption or industrial production. • Importance of 4 technological fields, within which Wallonia has players who can achieve a good competitive position and critical size, in particular by diversifying the fields of application of these technologies. • Acting throughout the entire life cycle of an innovation project in order to fulfil the mission of competitiveness clusters: to create jobs and economic activity, they must be in a position to support companies upstream and downstream of the “competitiveness cluster” project. While the core business remains, for MecaTech, the setting up of projects, this must be done within the broader framework of a company's development project. • Crossing Industry and Digital to increase added value and accelerate growth. Digital | Industry 4.0 is part of the DNA of the MecaTech Cluster with 60% of the industrial members and 70% of the labelled projects implementing or developing one (or more) digital technology(ies). The strategy of the MecaTech Cluster is to cross the capacities of companies in the digital supply and the needs of “demand” industries in three dimensions: innovation, industrialisation and training. • Mobilising the ecosystem around “sector” projects. To meet the challenges facing Wallonia (societal, environmental, reindustrialisation, etc.), it is necessary to implement the competitiveness cluster policy in a broader context that encompasses the entire ecosystem in which companies develop.
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