AI turbo for future work

Kiel/Hamburg, 11 May 2021: The ZBW – Leibniz Information Centre for Economics and partners from research and business will create the foundations for future-oriented labour research in the newly-started project CoCo. Collaboration with regional skills centres is expected to bring success to a useful application of AI technologies in the working environment. The nucleus of this BMBF-funded project is a “cloud of labour research”.

Digitisation and Artificial Intelligence are changing the working environment. They create opportunities for future work that have not yet been studied. The project “Connect & Collect” (CoCo), funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research, now connects the interdisciplinary actors in labour research and essential infrastructure service providers for economic research to study just these opportunities across disciplines.

The nucleus of this project is an AI-based “cloud of labour research”. This interdisciplinary data and knowledge storage supports linked research and innovation work between science and business and provides structures for sustainable knowledge transfer. In this way, research velocity and ever shorter development cycles in business can be successfully harmonised.

The ZBW – Leibniz Information Centre for Economics will design, develop and implement the socio-technical infrastructure for this cloud of labour research. In addition, the ZBW ensures the reach, sustainability and consolidation of this data and knowledge storage. The ZBW will develop incentive systems and concrete measures to make the cloud a living and attractive space for networking and cooperation between science and business. These systems will be tested and optimised in regular cycles.

In cooperation with the skills centres, the ZBW, directed by Professors Klaus Tochtermann and Isabella Peters, identifies requirements and success factors and works out a goal for efficient research and innovation work of the future. This will provide the basis for the design of the technical infrastructure of the cloud of labour research as an open web platform, where all actors can access research findings and thus contribute to the further development of knowledge.

The ZBW will give rise to new concepts, approaches and scientific findings about incentive systems and the implementation of Artificial Intelligence in the context of digital information infrastructures and Open Science.

About “Connect Collect: AI-based cloud for interdisciplinary networked research and innovation for future work (CoCo)”:

The scientific project CoCo is part of the programme “Future of value creation. Research on production, services and work” funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and supervised by the project sponsor Karlsruhe (PTKA). The project has a duration of four years and is funded to the amount of 4 million Euros. The project partners are Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Engineering in Stuttgart (lead), the Fraunhofer Institute for Factory Operation and Automation in Magdeburg, the Fraunhofer Center for International Management and Knowledge Economy in Leipzig, the ZBW – Leibniz Information Centre for Economics in Kiel/Hamburg, and the German Institute for Adult Education – Leibniz Centre for Lifelong Learning in Bonn. Project website:
Project website