Digitization in combination with new industrial technologies 4.0 not only gives production companies the opportunity to produce products from mass production to batch size 1. The real potential hides itself much earlier in the entire product development process: thanks to a fully digital process chain, different parties - from experts to suppliers to developers - can work together across company boundaries. This also includes the customers themselves, who want to actively contribute to product development. Open approaches such as crowd engineering and co-creation promise a great potential for innovation here, but they have not yet been tested so far.

More Information: iao.fraunhofer.de/presse