On 23 July 2021, State Secretary for Economic Affairs Dr. Patrick Rapp presented awards to the current winners of the "100 Places for Industry 4.0 in Baden-Württemberg" competition via video message.
"Industry, SMEs and start-ups in Baden-Württemberg are leading the way in the implementation of Industry 4.0 - this is impressively confirmed by our award-winning projects today," emphasized the State Secretary on the occasion of the awards. "Baden-Württemberg will only remain Europe's leading location for innovation and business if the state's small and medium-sized companies in particular continue to make bold progress with digitalization. With the award ceremony, we want to make tangible and visible Industry 4.0 solutions from SMEs and start-ups that create added value even better known." With the current focus on "Resilient value creation", the competition was looking for solutions that could significantly improve the resilience of business and production processes in times of the coronavirus pandemic by means of new digitalization solutions and thus maintain production. However, the current awards also recognized winners from other areas of Industry 4.0.
With this award, the network initiative "Allianz Industrie 4.0 Baden-Württemberg" aims to bundle expertise from production technology as well as information and communication technology, network all key players and support medium-sized industrial companies in the implementation of Industry 4.0 through innovative transfer offers.
In his video speech, State Secretary for Economic Affairs Dr Patrick Rapp praised the benefits of the SOFLEX product for the digitalization of production.
