Enabling Small Medium Enterprises (SMEs) to improve their potential through the Teaching Factory paradigm

In the last decade, Teaching Factories, which enable a two-way knowledge transfer in manufacturing education, have been built up in industry and academia. Such initiatives from local to worldwide level help both parties to mutually benefit. This paper introduces a framework for the delivery of industrial learning and training to young engineers creating at the same time the prerequisites which enable SMEs to explore new technologies through the Teaching Factory paradigm. In particular, through this framework, participants will be the receivers of valuable knowledge and will be able to cope with the increasing industrial requirements of the factories of the future. Following this framework, a win-win collaboration is going to be achieved with the involved parties, academia and industry, to benefit reciprocally. Finally, the proposed framework is validated in a use case from an equipment manufacturing industry and the presented results demonstrate the potential of incorporating Small Medium Enterprises (SMEs) in the Teaching Factory paradigm.