Unlocking the potential of digitalisation together

A new innovation centre for digital transformation in industry, the Bremen Digital Hub Industry (DHI), has been ceremonially opened. The ideas and experimentation space with an industrial focus was created in close cooperation between the Bremen Senate, the University of Bremen, Lenze and Encoway.

In the technology park near the university, this unique innovation ecosystem has been created after a construction period of only one and a half years. It is designed for the use of digital technologies and, above all, for transfer and collaboration. The hub, funded by the state of Bremen, is primarily intended to enable small and medium-sized industrial companies to undergo the urgently needed digital transformation and serve as a testing ground for innovations and new business models.

SMEs in particular are facing major challenges in the face of an increasingly volatile environment. They have to successfully manage their day-to-day business while at the same time developing innovations that will secure business success in the future. Digitalisation offers enormous potential for this. The question, however, is how companies are to implement the digital transformation quickly and in a value-creating manner on their own, without sufficient (digital) expertise and with very limited resources.

The answer is through collaboration. “In our technologically and organisationally complex world, we can only be successful in the future through collaboration. For us in Germany and Europe in particular, success is increasingly a question of intelligent collaboration,” says Lenze CEO Christian Wendler, summarising the motivation behind the project.

He continues: “Our mission at Lenze is to competently accompany SMEs, in particular our medium-sized customers, in their digital transformation and to offer them an ecosystem for this valuable exchange. The Digital Hub Industry offers excellent conditions and an extraordinarily creative environment for this.”

The idea of the DHI is to create a place for exchange between companies and research fields of the university and colleges. On the one hand, companies like Lenze provide their industrial know-how and contribute their digital challenges and current problems as concrete objects of investigation for research projects. On the other hand, the companies benefit from the research results and can transform them into new digital products, services, or business models.

In her welcoming address, Kristina Vogt, senator for economic affairs, labour and Europe, emphasised the importance of the Digital Hub Industry for the state of Bremen: “Medium-sized companies and start-ups, in particular, are supported and strengthened on their path to digitisation through needs-oriented and practical offerings. The Digital Hub Industry thus sustainably increases the attractiveness of our location, it creates new jobs and secures existing ones.”