Academic FabLabs for industry 4.0: Experience at University of Naples Federico II

The economic crisis of recent years has led to a vacillation in the number of jobs, providing an opportunity to innovate the productive context. Today this opportunity is represented by the Industrial Revolution 4.0, inspired by the movement of “makers” with the diffusion of digital craft [1]. This is a movement of technology enthusiasts who, driven by an innovative approach, exploit digital design and self-fabrication prototyping (with low-cost hardware and open-source software) to concretize their ideas into highly-technological products. Makers develop their work into actual technological sites, so-called FabLabs (Fabrication Laboratories) [2], sometimes located near university campuses. In this scenario, young IT engineers have more chances to gain not only high-technology know-how about recent innovation trends (multidisciplinary) but also business skills to make them more and more self-employed. Jobs lost in big industry, which until 2008 led the global economic development model, will hardly be recovered, due to the huge level of job customization. Therefore, young engineers should be ready to invent new opportunities by leveraging technological advances, available now like never before. The experience gained at the University of Naples Federico II in Naples, Italy in this area is described in this paper. A new model of teaching for students pursuing the Master of Science Degrees in Electrical and Information Engineering was proposed, aimed at reproducing the aspects, the problems, and the interactions unique to small IT business, and later giving rise to a FabLAB.