MANUFACTURING IN EUROPE AND CROATIA TILL 2020: THE FORECASTS OF MANVIS DELPHI RESEARCH

Good forecasting is extremely important for strategic and tactical decision making. Forecasting enables companies, individuals or whole nations to prepare themselves for future events. That is why the European Commission started the project Manufacturing Visions – MANVIS – so that we can investigate the future of manufacturing in Europe. MANVIS is designed as a holistic research of relevant concepts – from manufacturing technology to organisational concepts. The research is divided into 10 main topics. Primary focus is put on time span of realisation and widespread use of certain concept and the question: does Europe lag behind world forces as America and Japan. 22 countries were involved in the research. As in many long term forecasting researches (time span is 20 years), Delphi method is used. The results are very interesting for the whole Europe and we compared them to Croatian answers. The main problem in Europe is the question of relocation to areas with lower labour costs and lower environmental standards. The other important question is how to increase Europe’s competitiveness. Now we see that it is necessary to invest more into research and development of intelligent and nano materials. Experts say that potential barriers are economic viability, technological feasibility, and lack of R&D funding. Finally we would like to address questions which bother Croatian companies. Results show that Croatian government should take a more active role in protecting local manufacturing. Also is needed to invest in permanent education, the necessity of using new technologies and more innovations. To solve these problems, the identifi ed barriers are the ineffi ciency of public law and lack of highly qualifi ed human resources. We believe that government incentives to local production would keep these invaluable human resources in Croatia. The source of competitive advantage greatly depends on possibility of innovation and that cannot be achieved without top specialists