Developing the Next Generation of Engineers for Intelligent and Sustainable Manufacturing: A Case Study

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, social and technological change has increased the gap between the competences needed by industry and those provided by the universities’ curricula. This requires an increasingly integrated approach by academia and industry in order to afford the problem of engineering competences’ obsolescence. Framed in the above premises, the aim of this paper is to present the results of a two year postgraduate training program aimed at developing a new archetype of human capital to face the requirements of Intelligent and Sustainable Manufacturing. The case study presented in the paper addresses the needs for providing manufacturing education to meet the challenges in terms of ‘‘who’’—the profile for the next generation of manufacturing engineer; ‘‘what’’—the new system for education and its contents, and ‘‘how’’—innovative learning approaches and strategy to incentive the development of competence. The findings demonstrate the radical innovation in developing the next generation of engineers for Intelligent and Sustainable Manufacturing and the importance of a learning environment that is strictly based on virtuous industry–university partnerships