Community Co-created Distributed Manufacturing

As part of InterAct’s sandpit funding, a team of researchers at Loughborough, Derby, Durham and Teesside Universities have conducted a series of questionnaires, workshops and interviews with manufacturers, policy makers, educators and community members to assess the key impediments to digital technology adoption in manufacturing.

This research aims to derive a potential solution, building a platform to bring together key stakeholder groups and address some of the barriers to digitalisation, driving change at a local level. This work included examining the role of both digital but also physical spaces, such as makerspaces.

The work highlights the need to improve perceptions of manufacturing and digital technologies at community level, with the potential to expand these concepts at national, or international level.

This research was conducted by Dr. Elaine Conway, (Loughborough Business School), Professor Atanu Chaudhuri (Durham University), Dr. Jay Daniel (University of Derby), Dr. Usman Adeel (Teesside University). This work was supported by the UKRI Made Smarter Innovation Challenge and the Economic and Social Research Council via InterAct [Grant Reference ES/W007231/1].