Industry makes a significant contribution to the European economy and provides 36 million jobs to Europeans but industrial products are also the third biggest contributors to greenhouse gas emissions and have a negative footprint on depletion of resources , pollution or biodiversity loss. Today it is clear that disruptive and sustainable technologies are needed if we want to comply with the Paris Agreement and at the same time keep and create jobs in Europe.

“There is no time to lose, we need to act now”, said Professor Thomas Bauernhansl, director of the Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Engineering and Automation IPA at the ManuFUTURE workshop in Brussels, “new bio-intelligent manufacturing concepts will help to address the challenges we face.” Bio-based innovation will play a major role in the transition of various industries to circular economy models. “Using biological waste or renewable resources to manufacture chemical, pharmaceutical, packaging or various consumer products is just the beginning towards a climate-neutral and circular economy where bio economy already today plays an important role”, explained Dr. Markus Wolperdinger, Director of the Fraunhofer Institute for Interfacial Engineering and Biotechnology IGB.

The Biological Transformation

At the ManuFUTURE workshop in Brussels Professor Bauernhansl and Dr. Wolperdinger presented, as the result of a broadly based scientific consultation of German companies, three progressive stages of the Biological Transformation: bio-inspired, bio-integrated and bio-intelligent.

In the first mode, the bio-inspiration stage, biological principles and phenomena that have emerged in the course of evolution are transferred to value-adding systems: This results in new materials and structures (e.g. lightweight construction), new functionalities (e.g. biomechanics) and new organisational and cooperative solutions (e.g. swarm intelligence). The second mode, called the bio-integration stage, was explained by Maurizio Gattiglio, Co-Chair of ManuFUTURE, using the example of self-healing materials in which biological processes are integrated into manufacturing processes or products. The third mode is what researchers call bio-intelligence, or a merging of biology, IT and engineering.

During the workshop the experts elaborated on the "Strategic Plan" of the Commission, described the potential of the Biological Transformation for Europe and made recommendations for possible priority areas and accompanying policy measures. The discussions focused in particular on the impact that the biological transformation will have on the sustainability of the industry and the technological sovereignty of Europe.

The Strategic Plan of Horizon Europe

The ManuFUTURE workshop was organized in light of the preparation of the "Strategic Plan" for the forthcoming research framework programme "Horizon Europe". On 28^th of June 2019, the European Commission published a preliminary version of this plan which will be put under scrutiny by an intensive stakeholder consultation process. It should reflect current trends and challenges and will define thematic cornerstones of “Horizon Europe” for the first four years and serve as a guiding document for the preparation of work programmes and calls for proposals. The Biological Transformation of manufacturing being an important part of these trends.

The workshop results will be summarized in a working paper and made available to the Commission in September 2019. In autumn, the topic of biological transformation will again be a priority issue  at the “Research and Innovation Days” of DG Research and Innovation in Brussel (24 – 26 September 2019) and at the "ManuFUTURE 2019 Conference – Sustainable Smart Manufacturing" in Helsinki (30 September – 1 October 2019).