The manufacturing sector needs to move into a more proactive strategic approach to meet key challenges such as demographic shifts in the consumer market, skills gap and technological innovations. The emergence of global value chains has transformed the manufacturing ecosystem by making each component, from research and development, to fabrication, distribution and marketing more interdependent. Skills and talent improvement, innovations, industrial policy and resource efficiency are four areas which are in the common interest of government, the private sector and society. It is critical to address this convergence of interests because overlooking an advanced manufacturing strategy could lead to a lack of competitiveness within manufacturing value chain.

Report by the World Economic Forum