During the past five years, the Malta government has implemented effective measures to take the digitalisation transformation to the next level. The focus should now be on reducing gaps, innovating with digital technologies, and broadening European cooperation. Adapted solutions could be provided by European initiatives and digital hub network.
Malta Digital Innovation Technology Strategy
Between 2014 and 2020, a national digital plan was set up to encourage a robust, aggressive, ICT-enabled, export-driven, and competitive industry through three strategic enablers: Regulation and Legislation, Infrastructure and Human Capital. Regarding SMEs and start-up companies, the plan has focused on encouraging SMEs to see ICT more as a tool for reducing costs, innovating, and gaining access to broader markets. SMEs in the ICT sector know that the small local market is their biggest growth-related weakness. Furthermore, inefficient government bureaucracy, limited access to financing, insufficient capacity to innovate, and the lack of investors are not helping their digital take off. The new strategy is still not yet published.
Although there are still fundamental gaps to fulfil, the adoption of the Smart Specialisation Strategy 2021- 2027 has shown Malta's compromise with digital technologies as one of the priority areas for investment in innovation over the coming years. According to Digital Economy and Society Index (DESI) 2022, Malta has focused on developing and deploying digital technologies. Furthermore, to help position the country as a global hub for emerging technologies, Tech.mt, a public-private partnership, has emerged from the collaboration between the Government of Malta and the Malta Chamber of Commerce.
European access to digital transformation journey for Maltese SMEs
Summer has brought excellent news for Malta's SMEs. The European Commission's Recovery and Resilience Plan for Malta will give a new financial boost to the digitalisation of SMEs, which will be able to benefit from €15 million. As part of the plan, eligible companies will get €50,000 per digitalisation investment in digital technologies from the SME Digitalisation Grant Scheme to develop e-commerce websites and procure digital solutions. In addition, the Malta Chamber of SMEs also contributes to consolidating the SMEs' landscape by conducting several initiatives with the support of EU funds, such as creating documentation, organising conferences, and information sessions about digitalisation and industry 4.0 technologies.
Maltese ambitious manufacturing SMEs will also be able to aid from pan-European access to advanced manufacturing advice, expertise, and training with the 55,6 M€ project ADMA TranS4MErs. The project is designed to ensure that Malta, and Europe, contribute to transforming the economy and building an inclusive society. Malta Enterprise technical advisers, with ADMA TranS4MErs support, now have the mission to ease knowledge transfer in advanced skills in digital technologies in SMEs.
Building a new reality for Malta second biggest sector
Electronics and food and beverage are the most substantial segment of Malta's manufacturing industry. According to Malta's Central Bank, in 2010, the electronics sector generated almost 45% of the value added in manufacturing and slightly more than 5% of the total economy.
Improving the manipulation and assembly of fragile and transparent objects from semiconductors and medical field of application is the goal of the VOJEXT’s experiment. The challenge is to create an autonomous machine that can perform several critical steps in the production line with the added value of the human-robot interaction to allow the real-time correction, prevention, or modification of critical issues for the positive outcome of the process. VOJEXT project encourages producers and SMEs to adopt cognitive autonomous systems for human-robot interaction and dynamizes science-driven industry approaches engaging human and Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) in the same loop; thus, amplifying the cognitive capabilities needed to achieve more effective sociotechnical and business ecosystems.
The project is an innovation action under the European initiative I4MS, ICT Innovation for Manufacturing SMEs, which benefits manufacturing SMEs and mid-caps from technological and financial support to conduct experiments allowing them to test digital innovations in their business via open calls. One of the key services the initiative offers SMEs is the possibility of testing with one of the technologies supported by I4MS. Innovation Actions provides end-users with technical support and cascade funding for implementing Application Experiments (AEs) based on their specific I4MS technologies.
Maltese Food and beverage sector could also be inspired by Smart warehousing system for the optimization in winery logistics from innovation action DIH-World. The main objective of this experience is to optimize the storage of both the stocking and unstacking in the warehouse of the winery to follow the control and order of all available products and to facilitate their handling and transfer. This cost decrease was accomplished by the pallet trucks' reduced fuel consumption, less packing, and the operators' reduced labour costs.
More information about I4MS and its innovation actions here