PROGRAM

Keynote Speakers

Jenny Elfsberg - Head of innovation management at Vinnova

Jenny Elfsberg has many years of experience working in senior positions within Volvo Group. From 2009 to 2018 she headed up the Emerging Technologies & Innovation team within Volvo Construction Equipment, responsible for explorative innovation activities and related research. During 2018 to 2020 she was located in Mountain View, California where she established hub335, a corporate innovation hub and innovation collaboration community in the heart of Silicon Valley.

As head of division, Jenny Elfsberg is responsible for Vinnova's efforts in innovation management, which include management and organization of innovation activities and the link between innovation, business and sustainability. She is also part of the authority's executive management team.

Henric Johnson - Global Head of Science and Innovation at Business Sweden

Henric Johnson is professor in Computer Science and an academic entrepreneur with many years of applied experience in industry and academia (and the collaboration between the public and private sector). In addition, he has recently been a Diplomat and the Swedish Science and Innovation Counsellor to the U.S. He is a member of the European Commission expert group on support for the strategic coordinating process for the Partnerships under Horizon Europe, Roskilde University board of directors and the University of Colorado Boulder’s external advisory board for research and innovation. Henric has been a visiting professor at Stanford University and a former senior Wallenberg-Vinnova fellow at the Nordic Innovation House in Silicon Valley. Professor Johnson has also been part of the Stanford Academy Leadership Program and the Stanford Fellow program.
Henric has been an academic leader for several years in the position as Pro Vice-Chancellor (Prorektor) at Blekinge Institute of Technology, Sweden. He has also been the Director for the Center for Electronic Security and an initiator of the Blue Science Park.

Andie Zhang - Leading Collaborative Robotics at ABB

Andie Zhang is responsible for ABB’s portfolio of Collaborative Robots. She develop and drive ABB’s strategy and vision on collaborative robotics and technologies, their application across different industrial segments and customer groups, robot safety technologies, as well as ease-of-use developments. She has successfully developed and launched multiple key products in ABB’s collaborative robotics portfolio including the single-arm YuMi, GoFa and SWIFTI cobots.

Prior to joining ABB Andie worked in various management positions in the fields of Sales Management, Marketing, as well as Supply Chain Management in industry-leading multinationals. She holds a Master’s degree in Engineering with focus on Human-Computer Interaction from the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden. She also holds diplomas from the Oxford Said Business School in digital marketing and executive leadership. Andie was named as one of the 25 Women in Robotics in 2018, as well as one of 50 most renowned women in Robotics in 2020, and has given keynote speeches at events including the World Robot Conference in Beijing in 2018, the Gather festival in Stockholm in 2019, European Robotics Week in 2020, European Robotics Forum 2021, etc. 

Thomas Lezama - Vice President Digital Engineering at  Volvo Group Trucks Technology

Thomas Lezama is the CIO and head of digital engineering at Volvo Group Trucks Technology, responsible for the engineering method and tool landscape as well as engineering data and product cyber security. Thomas has significant experience from developing and implementing new technologies and tools for the full end-2-end engineering landscape. Prior to the current position he has held senior positions in both Volvo Group and Airbus Group with responsibility to redefine and modernize the engineering process, method and tool landscape.

Vision Talk Speakers

Cecilia Warrol - Produktion2030

Cecilia Warrol is a senior expert in manufacturing and industrial R&D at the Swedish Association of Engineering Industries (Teknikföretagen). Representing 4200 technology and manufacturing companies; from global brands to suppliers and innovative start-ups.

Cecilia is the Programme Director of the Swedish Innovation programme Produktion2030. A programme focusing on manufacturing industry, investing in cutting edge innovation, education and SME:s. She is active in national and European research and innovation programs. Currently chair of EIT Manufacturing and active member of EFFRA and Manufuture. Serving as adviser to Swedish universities, authorities as well as Ministry of Enterprise and Innovation.

Cecilia is passionate about manufacturing and very proud to be part of actions that drive innovation and strengthens competitiveness across industry, research and the public sector in Sweden as well as in Europe.

Martin Fröberg - The Knowledge Foundation

Martin Fröberg is analyst at The Knowledge Foundation. At the foundation, Martin is part of the team that works with analyses of the operations of the foundation. Inter alia, Martin works with analysing the operations of the foundation and how they have contributed to forming advanced academic research and education environments. In addition, he is also responsible for the analysis of co-production, i.e., how academia private enterprise best can cooperate when it comes to research and education.

Throughout his career, Martin has worked in the borderland between public organisations and private enterprise. Before joining The Knowledge Foundation, Martin was the Executive Secretary of the Governmental Enquiry called Innovation as driving force – from research to utility (SOU 2020:59). Martin also has experience from working as an evaluation consultant and from working at the Ministry of Enterprise and Innovation. Martin holds an M.Sc. in International Economics.

Gabriel Granström - The Knowledge Foundation

Gabriel Granström is a Programme Manager and analyst at The Knowledge Foundation. He is responsible for a research funding programme granting over 70 million SEK annually to research projects carried out in collaboration between academia and industry, aiming specifically to advance scientific research and strengthen industry competitiveness. In addition, he has a special responsibility in analyzing the portfolio of funded projects as well as to develop measures in how to follow the development of research and education environments.

In addition, Gabriel has previously been a Wallenberg-Vinnova Fellow at Nordic Innovation House in Palo Alto, United States, and provided a head start for Nordic startups in Silicon Valley. He holds an M.Sc. in industrial engineering and management, specializing in strategic business development and innovation, and has recently published an article on Corporate Innovation Hubs in Technovation vol.111.

Workshops

Workshop on education: Lifelong learning in co-creation between Academia and Industry

Moderator: Professor Bengt-Göran Rosén, Halmstad University.

During the workshop visions and status on education in collaboration and "Life-long learning" as a concept will be discussed. The discussion starts off from a concept developed based on small (1-3 credits) education modules from the ongoing national project Ingenjör 4.0. The project is exploring joint academia-academia- and academia to industry education as one (of many) enablers of the life-long learning concept. Invited speakers from industry and academia will initiate the discussion. In the end of the session challenges identified for the co-operation will be penetrated by the aid of the audience and a plenary panel.

Workshop on work instruction design: Universal design in manual assembly

Moderators: Martin Kurdve och Sandra Mattsson, RISE Research Institutes of Sweden.

Husmuttern AB has developed a concept for universal design that was evaluated and further developed with researchers at Rise and Chalmers. Husmuttern has with the system, made for example over 400,000 protective coats, visors, interior walls, packaging and will launch the system with the universal design concept for the construction of house modules. The focus is to develop new possibilities with a languageless system, deaf employees, etc.

In this workshop you can view the visual instructions developed for manual assembly and discuss how future workplaces should be designed to be as inclusive as possible.

Beyond flexible – how can we realize ultra-flexible production?

Moderators: Anna Syberfeldt, University of Skövde, Luis Ribeiro Linköping University and Johan Frisk OpiFlex.

In this workshop we discuss how the trend of hyper-customization pushes the needs for production systems to be not only flexible, but ultra-flexible. We discuss how this challenge can be tackled in practice and present ideas on how to develop sustainable, efficient and intelligent production systems with dynamic resource management in a cyber-physical context. The workshop takes a technical perspective on the challenges of flexibility, discussing potential hardware and software concepts.

The workshop is arranged in collaboration between the two Production 2030 projects ULTRA and FLAP.

Redefining the research agenda for sustainable digitalized production

Moderator: Mélanie Despeisse, Chalmers.

The session will start with review (and update!) of eco-efficiency principles in the context of recent industrial developments. The workshop objective is to identify pressing research needs to advance the sustainability of production systems using digitalization as a tool to integrate environmental information as a driver of performance. It is critical to understand the challenges faced by manufacturers and how to overcome them in order to accelerate the uptake of best practices for eco-efficient and circular industrial systems.
This workshop connects to the TRUST project aiming to boost research excellence in the area of industrial sustainability in collaboration with the University of Cambridge (UK) and ISQ (Portugal).