The project ‘MAIA’ aims to create an innovative and timely ‘Research and Innovation Staff Exchange’ by developing an international academy, comprising of 14 academic partners . The Exchange will focus on active ageing industrial workforce problems and needs. Europe, together with other developed/rapidly developing economies (RDE), such as the USA, Japan, Canada, New Zealand, and China, are experiencing a similar problem: a rapidly increasing proportion of older workers in the industrial workforce. The industry related implications of this phenomena are deep and wide-spread, including concerns involving workforce depletion, irrecoverable loss of experiential knowledge, workforce constraints on adoption of Industry 4.0 technologies and processes, the need to design and develop ergonomic and tech assisted work methods, as well as changes in managerial styles and organizational incentive and improvement programs. Our project will be the first to bring global scope and perspective on the complex phenomena of the interaction of an aging industrial workforce with current and emergent processes and technologies and organizational design and management. The research objective is to develop new knowledge about the interaction of an aging industrial workforce with a range of contextual multi-level factors such as culture, location, workforce demographics, technology type and sophistication, company policies, organizational design, managerial attributes, process type, supervisory styles, and more micro-level variables. Relevant extant industry related theoretical lens such as Hofstede’s cultural dimensions theory, TAM (technology acceptance models), and Socio-Technical theory shall guide the investigation. The data shall be analysed using a rigorous combinatorial approach, employing analytical, statistical, and qualitative methods. Our deliverables shall consist of theory development, reasoned and study results-based policy recommendations, innovations in production and distribution technology designs, and specific, practical, managerial insights and prescriptions.
The primary objective of MAIA Academy is to establish a distinctive research and innovation staff exchange network focused on the challenges associated with an aging workforce in the manufacturing sector. MAIA project adopts a multidisciplinary approach to achieve the following goals:
-Investigate the needs and requirements of the aging workforce in European production and assembly systems.
-Develop new design methodologies to design assembly and production workspaces for ageing-workers, emphasizing the preservation of productivity, quality, and safety.
-Create new analytical models to support ageing-oriented assembly and production line design, validating them through global case studies.
-Design and test ergonomic devices aimed at assisting aging workers in reducing muscular fatigue and the risk of musculoskeletal disorders during tasks.
-Design and test immersive and virtual reality instruments to guide and support ageing workers in the production process.
