This week the head of the LSP Center, Chrsitian Schlette was invited on behalf of NextGen Robotics to speak at a panel as part of the EU Regions Week.
The panel, which focused on retaining and attracting talent for regional growth, had speakers from around the EU, all shining a light on the different challenges and solutions in their regions.
“I am also an attracted talent you could say, I am a German that has been living in Denmark for about 7 years and was attracted to this cluster in the area of Fyn where many of the new robotics developments come from,” said Christian, “by being a lighthouse in this regard in Europe, we are attracting researchers and engineers to our region. We also have close collaboration with different educational institutions around us in order to help companies upskill their people from being welders for example to operators of robotics systems. So we invite the companies to work directly together with us.”
When asked how the LSP center can upskill entire workforces, Christian responded “as a university we can’t just go there and give a lecture. This why we work with local and regional educational institutions in order to really cook it down, to meet people where they are, and to help with upskilling at all levels.”
Christian then went on to explain the issues facing large structure production are difficult to solve with conventional robots “if LEGO was asking we would say well, just buy more robots and the job would be done, but this is not feasible in the sectors here, because those robots do not exist.
You have to imagine the robots need to be way bigger, they have to be operational in a complex environment like shipyards and construction sites, where people are moving around, so we are developing new robotics solutions to help those companies to overcome the lack of workforce that they are confronted with.”
Chrsitans comments were very well received by the panel and the audience, with Dubravka Suica, Vice President for the European Commission for democracy and demography commenting that the panel “all have very a diverse situations, but all of us have the same goal”.