Digital Innovation Hubs have become the national and European instrument to speed up digitization in SMEs/MidCaps to ensure the EU’s future industrial leadership. Most EU Member States DIHs have established, in a growing number of regions and sectors, complemented by regional and national networks. Also the EC is deploying a vast number of initiatives to support DIH activities. The next step is to build a pan EU network that coordinates and integrates this wide variety of initiatives and ensure collaboration and quality. DIHNET.EU just does that: build a network of networks involving hubs, competence centres, and regional and national programmes and infrastructures. The aim of this EU DIH network is to ensure the best possible support to SMEs and midcaps. DIHNET.EU will contribute to this in the following: - Enhancing collaboration between stakeholders from the European DIH Community to better support SMEs/MidCaps with their digitisation, by creating awareness, understanding and activating the ecosystem on DIHs challenges and possible solutions. - Offering DIHs an online infrastructure to facilitate their collaboration. This platform will support the DIHNET.EU Community with a wide range of services, information and tools that will help DIHs to communicate, align, collaborate and synchronise activities. - Developing a clear overview of the DIH related services provided in Europe and align them. - Upgrading the DIH Catalogue: identifying/activating activities in the DIH Community in coherence with regional, national and EU policies. - Creating a strategy to reinforce the specialization of these services to SMEs and MidCaps, as well as support its uptake by relevant DIH and DIH networks. - Creating a vision and strategy on a self-sustaining business model for this network of DIHs, and to make this operational. The project is carried out by TNO, Tecnalia, Fundingbox, euRobotics, BluMorpho and FEDIL, have strong experience in DIHs and well connected to the EU DIH community.

As a coordination and support measure this project is aimed to increase the efforts of the EC and the Member States in pursuing the strategic objective of Europe’s reindustrialization and growth during Luxembourg’s Presidency of the Council of the EU (June-December 2015) through the organization of the MANUFUTURE 2015 conference focused on options for strategic investments in European manufacturing. The main objective of the conference is to identify and endorse new policy instruments, business models, support mechanisms and technologies that could help to strengthen and improve the manufacturing base in Europe given the existing regulatory framework and the constrains that EU manufacturers face on the global markets at this critical time. More specifically, the conference aims to involve in the consultation process over 750 stakeholders (policy makers, business leaders, innovators and academics) representing all manufacturing sectors in the EU27. The conference is structured along three major themes, including the issues related to widening access to finance for reindustrialisation and growth, moving European industry to the higher end of value chains, and creating synergy of support initiatives at EU level and in Member States with increased participation of financial markets. For each theme a list of sub-issues to be addressed by speakers have been identified through a consultation process with the High Level Group of Manufuture and the Ministries of Economy and Higher Education and Research which have endorsed the initiative of LXI to host this event. The proposal addresses the work programme topic NMP-38-2014 which calls for organising an event of a major strategic nature during the EU presidency of Luxembourg that could contribute towards creating better synergies between public and private initiatives to the benefit of the coherence of the overall actions within the field of research and innovation for the manufacturing sector.