The accelerated digitalisation of the economy and society has dramatically re-shaped the competitiveness policy. Thanks to new elements there are new challenges in the earlier successfully applied policies. Generally used concepts and categories of globalization are changing, such as international trade, productivity or small and medium-sized enterprises, which are increasingly difficult to interpret at the time of 4.0 industrial technologies, giant digital businesses, new global value chains, and the ever-growing digital platforms and dynamic start-ups.The latter also make breakthrough changes in financial areas, from the expansion of smart payment and service systems to the conversion of banking operations through interpersonal transactions (fintech).
The European Commission intends to accelerate this process with its Digital Single Market Strategy program. Moreover, the present Estonian-Bulgarian-Austrian EU presidency trio defines itself as a digital presidency trio and advocates rapid progress in such key areas as digital economy, including industry 4.0, the data economy and the free flow of data; security issues related to digitization, above all cyber security. At the same time it is noteworthy that our V4 Presidency's priority is also related to digitization, highlighting its collaborative areas of the horizontally expanding and vertically deepening development of the digital economy.
Consequently, the goal of the conference is the future of the automotive industry with special regard to the new industry value chain processes led by software-driven, autonomous management technologies with the aim of broadening the global dimension of the theme. (There is a competition between Germany and the Silicon Valley for the control over the value chain in the field of driverless car). At the same time it is essential to have a solid position both at regional and Member State’s level on the European Digital Agenda which shall be discussed and promoted at the highest political level, thus engaging also the social and economic actors.
The other aim of the conference is to speed up the cooperation in the region at governmental, institutional and entrepreneurial level which could bring Central Europe to a leading position in the digitalization and make it possible to its players to get engaged in intelligent vehicle manufacturing and in European pilot projects in the fields of European and urban mobility. We also highlight the importance of the cross-border cooperation, namely the development of test environments, test corridors, smart corridors, samples in use-case testing, standardisation, development of 5G infrastructure. Moreover, we wish to focus on the start-ups’ ecosystem with the two main themes of the event namely the Industry 4.0 system and the blockchain philosophy-based economy. The latter based on the financial services, the trend processes of the business and entrepreneurial models of fintech.