In an exclusive interview for the Siemens Xcelerator Community, David Erhard and Bill Johnston speak with Dale Dougherty, founder of Make Magazine and Maker Faire, to discuss how the maker movement represents a prototyping revolution for professional engineering and why companies should tap into what their engineers build on weekends to unlock unexpected innovation.

Recent industry developments show that flexible, software-defined automation is becoming both more viable and more necessary. Manufacturing and logistics leaders are finding themselves needing to adjust to a future defined by adaptability, interoperability, and intelligence at the edge.

Explore the WEF’s new Innovation Ecosystems Toolkit—insights and best practices for building collaborative, sustainable innovation networks.

There are ongoing efforts across the pharmaceutical and biomanufacturing sectors to strengthen operational resilience and innovation capacity. R&D labs are modernizing, the role of manufacturing execution systems (MES) is evolving, and the use of digital threads to improve efficiency and ensure compliance across the product lifecycle is happening in real time.

As artificial intelligence reshapes industry, its greatest impact won’t come from algorithms alone but from how we design around them. “Human-in-the-Loop” (HITL) principles place people at the center of intelligent systems, ensuring that trust, ethics, and accountability guide automation. From Siemens’ Industrial Co-Pilot to AI copilots across sectors, the future belongs to organizations that use AI to amplify human capability - not replace it.

In an exclusive interview for the Siemens Xcelerator Community, David Erhard and Bill Johnston speak with Ed Finn, founding director of the Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University, to discuss why imagination is essential to solving complex challenges and how organizations can learn to build their capacity for it.

Threats are growing more complex and interconnected. To combat that, Industrial cybersecurity is shifting toward real-time resilience across infrastructure, operations, and AI systems.

AI has become central to industrial strategy, but many companies are still struggling to translate promise into performance. The next phase of growth will depend as much on infrastructure, governance, and leadership as on the models themselves. Firms face growing costs for compute, new demands on oversight, and the challenge of redesigning workflows to realize true enterprise value.