Resumen de Developing the next generation of engineers for intelligentand sustainable manufacturing: A case study
Giustina Secundo, Giuseppina Passiante, Aldo Romano, Pasquale Moliterni
Promoting excellence in manufacturing emerges as a strategic goal for the years to come, both for industry and society;manufacturing education has been identified as a major driver to achieving this goal. However, the pace of economic, socialand technological change has increased the gap between the competences needed by industry and those provided by theuniversities’ curricula. This requires an increasingly integrated approach by academia and industry in order to affordthe problem of engineeringcompetences’ obsolescence. Framed in the above premises, the aim of this paper is to present theresults of a two year postgraduate training program aimed at developing a new archetype of human capital to face therequirements of Intelligent and Sustainable Manufacturing. The case study presented in the paper addresses the needs forproviding manufacturing education to meet the challenges in terms of ‘‘who’’—the profile for the next generation ofmanufacturing engineer; ‘‘what’’—the new system for education and its contents, and ‘‘how’’—innovative learningapproaches and strategy to incentive the development of competence. The findings demonstrate the radical innovation indeveloping the next generation of engineers for Intelligent and Sustainable Manufacturing and the importance of alearning environment that is strictly based on virtuous industry–university partnerships.
