IMT and TUM create the german-french academy for industry of the future

In the framework of the partnership between the French Alliance for Industry of the Future and the German platform Industrie 4.0, Institut Mines-Télécom (IMT) and Technische Universität München (TUM) have presented a plan to create a German-French Academy for Industry of the Future. The project was officially announced on October 27 by the French Minister for the Economy, Industry and Digital Affairs, Emmanuel Macron, as part of the conclusions of the Franco-German conference on digital transformation.

In his summing-up of the Franco-German conference on “accelerating the digital transformation of our economies”, Emmanuel Macron spoke on behalf of both himself and his German counterpart as he announced the creation of the German-French Academy for Industry of the Future, led by Institut Mines-Télécom and TUM. In their concluding speeches, French president François Hollande and German chancellor Angela Merkel both expressed their satisfaction with the foundation of this academy and their aspirations for its future.

Ambitions and objectives of the Academy

The academy has a threefold objective in terms of research and training for industry of the future:

• Form a cutting-edge research platform serving the fields of digital technology for industry, industrial organization and logistics, and human interfaces.
• Dovetail the strengths of the partners in order to develop new training programs, create contents (MOOCs) and step up the number of student exchanges.
• Set up innovative R&D projects in the framework of industrial partnerships working on flagship themes such as automation, flexibility, big data, the internet of things and security, but also logistics and transportation, organization and management, human-robot cooperation and intelligent agents.

More broadly speaking, the Academy will have the remit of conducting forward-thinking discussions and research on the place of humans in the digital and industrial transitions, and of overseeing the emergence of new paradigms for the industry of the future.

A federating initiative

Founded and led by Institut Mines-Télécom and Technische Universität München, both of whom are deeply involved in themes with strong links to industry of the future and corporate partnerships, the Academy will ultimately have a federating role with respect to partners of the alliance, such as Arts et Métiers ParisTech, other French academic partners, German universities of excellence, and the Fraunhofer Institutes.