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The growing complexity of organizational field makes companies to become agile. One important issue for this is to value the heterogeneity of the employees. With a view on this, companies can profit from having a diversity management. Especially fitting to this seems to be an elective affinity between agile companies and an inclusive & transformative diversity strategy: inside companies, innovation potentials can be identified and design thinking could be improved. Outside, agile companies could respond to their environment in a proactive way.

Due to increasingly specialised, diverse and also new competencies and competency profiles it becomes progressively more difficult to interpret educational achievements and to match requirement profiles with the competencies of individual persons or groups. The computational support with regards to keeping the information up to date, communication, search and analysis is limited if the competencies are described in natural language only. Thus, it seems advantageous to model competencies in a formal and machine-readable specification language. The following article suggests the notion of a generic formal syntax for learning outcomes. We outline how this would allow expressing intricate learning outcomes in a machine-readable ontology and their further processing with the Linked Data- and Semantic Web-approaches.

The past few years have shown that Digitization is not just a fad of the millennium, but rather the next inevitable step in technological evolution. It was and is a development that affects everything and everyone, both socially and industrially. But digital transformation requires more than just the conversion of individual processes in the company or the introduction of new technologies. Above all, it requires sustained agility in development and production, as well as ongoing employee training in order to be able to meet this demand for agility as a company.

In manual assembly, assistance systems are applied for the informational and physical support of employees. So far, assistance mainly focuses on some process-related aspects of assembly processes, while system acceptance, motivational perspectives are not considered. This article presents the gamification approach as a possibility to support the motivation of the workers. To facilitate a successful implementation of gamification, this paper presents a structured and method-based selection approach for game design elements.

Efficient product development can be a decisive factor in a company’s competition - it quickly falls behind who has to cope without simulation technologies. For large companies, these have long since become part of everyday life. But for small and medium-sized companies, they often remain wishful thinking for reasons of capacity and know-how. But: They, too, can benefit from the advantages of simulation with the right support and appropriate training programs.

We are currently experiencing rapid transformation in technologies and society. Due to the convergence of various megatrends, these changes have considerable impacts on everyday life. Our study aims to identify relevant strategies for the digital future of a macro-region (Tyrol, South Tyrol and Veneto). The study conducts semi-structured interviews with representatives of companies, universities and local governments, using the approach of a triple helix model. Based on the empirical analysis, we develop an action plan for the digital transformation of the macro-region.

In times of digital transformation, it is important to counteract the associated challenges in the work world. This requires resilience and flexibility on the part of employees. Resilience has a positive effect on the health and performance of individuals. Therefore, organizations should support their employees in developing a positive attitude towards the unknown and increasing complexity, aspects that are often associated with new technologies. In this article, two exemplary corporate actions for organizational development aiming to strengthen the resilience of employees are explained.

The paper describes a modular, AR-based assistance system that guides the user through a maintenance task by displaying components and meta-information step by step. By supplementing a learning success control, the system can also be used for continuing education of service technicians and operating personnel. Special emphasis was placed on an integrated information system that allows maintenance information and training tasks to be created with little effort and at the same learning and work tasks to be teached on the systems used in practice.

The article presents design approaches and methods for the implementation of adaptive assistance systems and shows the influence of different operational roles on the design process. A user-adaptive and context-sensitive design makes it possible to adapt the contents and the presentation to the requirements of the user and to the task. We present a systematic approach that shows the design dimensions based on individual and task-related categories. We supplement this systematic with design dimensions of an assistance system including the technology selection as well as the design.

Everyone is talking about artificial intelligence and machine learning. However, knowledge about what the terms actually mean is often not yet extensively available. The article presents some basic knowledge and shows which application possibilities and added values machine learning can offer for production. Robotics, for example a bin-picking system, benefits in particular from the technologies described. Finally, the article deals with the topic of explainability of machine learning processes. For technical, legal and social reasons, decoding the “black box” is an essential task.