“Entrepreneurial courage is the key ingredient”

Manufacturing firms in developing countries face challenges in closing productivity gaps while adopting Industry 4.0 technologies. Learning factories are one helpful approach to countering these challenges. One such example is the learning factory Fábrica do Futuroin São Paulo, Brazil, which has engaged students, supported competence development, and collaborated with industry in applied research, functioning as a hub for advanced manufacturing initiatives.

Conveying the complexity and multifaceted nature of the energy transition to a broad audience is a challenge. This article demonstrates how interactive serious games on a multitouch table can help make connections tangible and comprehensible. The games and the table were used in various conversational contexts. These are presented here in three case vignettes based on participant observation of the different applications, as well as situated and shared reflection. The vignettes demonstrate how interaction can trigger epistemic processes, enable shifts in perspective, and foster collective thinking, all of which are necessary for shaping the future of society as a whole.

Explainable artificial intelligence (XAI)-based nudging, while ethically complex, may offer a favorable alternative to rigid, algorithmically generated schedules that simultaneously respects worker autonomy and improves overall scheduling performance on the shop floor. This paper presents a controlled laboratory study demonstrating the successful nudging of 28 industrial engineering students in a job shop simulation. The study shows that the observed concordance between students’ sequencing decisions and a predefined target sequence increases by 9% through nudging. This is done by using XAI to analyze students’ preferences and adjusting task deadlines and priorities in the simulation. The paper discusses the ethical issues of nudging, including potential manipulation, illusory autonomy, and reducing people to numbers. To mitigate these issues, it offers recommendations for implementing the XAI-based nudging approach in practice and highlights its strengths relative to rigid, ...