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The new contact point for all matters concerning the Smart City project "digital.interkommunal" of the municipality of Kalletal and the Old Hanseatic City of Lemgo has opened. The project office is located in Lemgo's Mittelstraße. From there, project manager Nicole Baeumer and her team will be in contact not only with the political bodies and administrations, but above all with citizens and other interest groups.

The Inclusion Prize of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia is awarded every two years and in 2020 was endowed with a total of 30,000 euros. A total of three prizes were awarded for the main topic "Participation through Digitalization". The assistance system from Fraunhofer IOSB-INA in Lemgo, which was developed together with wertkreis Gütersloh gGmbH, was able to prevail among the 144 applicant projects. The multifunctional, interactive workstation to support manual assembly processes was able to secure third place and once again prove that technological innovations in the context of the digital transformation can lead to numerous new added values and business models, but also perspectives and opportunities.

What do companies in the SME sector expect from Industry 4.0? Where do they hope for advantages, where are there tangible and concrete benefits? These questions are difficult to answer without first investing large sums in equipment and personnel. This is because existing plants, i.e. machines in which investments were made in the past and which are still performing their service perfectly, often do not provide any data for control and condition monitoring. With the so-called "I4.0 retrofit", these machines can be upgraded for Industrie 4.0 applications in order to be operated more safely, efficiently, flexibly and transparently. To this end, Fraunhofer IOSB-INA and the VDMA have for the first time written a guide that provides important assistance, especially for small and medium-sized enterprises, in the digitization of their existing machines.

Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies have long been part of day-to-day business in tech corporations - from service to internal processes and tools to products sold billions of times worldwide. And in industry, too, AI has already become deeply inscribed in production processes and established as a competitive advantage. But what about the local SME sector? How does the economy in Ostwestfalen-Lippe (OWL) benefit from the new achievements of AI, how do you create acceptance for the technologies and how can they have a positive impact on the daily business of manufacturing companies? In short, how can AI be used to secure a location?

How can rejects from plastic injection moulding machines be minimised or, ideally, completely eliminated? This question arose after a visit to a Digital in NRW LAB tour and subsequent discussions with employees of the Oskar Lehmann company. So-called "misses" are not only an economic problem in the entire plastics industry. In addition to the machine time, energy and resources consumed, these missing parts often have to be disposed of in a time-consuming and thus expensive manner. The more than 500 plastics technology companies in OWL are also engaged in a social discourse about the use of plastics today. They are therefore faced with the conflicting demands of preserving high-quality jobs in the region and using materials and energy responsibly. The avoidance of rejects is thus in the economic focus of the companies as well as in the social focus.

The decision to fund the it's OWL innovation project AutoS² - Automatic Safety and Security Assessment System for Intelligent Machines - was already made in February 2020. Despite the Covid 19 pandemic, all formalities have now been fulfilled in order to receive the funding decision from the State Ministry for Economic Affairs, Innovation, Digitalization and Energy (MWIDE).