ABSTRACT
This chapter is an introduction to the research presented in this publication. It provides a short overview of the Norwegian manufacturing industry as well as the research carried out in the eight-year SFI Manufacturing centre for research-based innovation. The research approach in the centre contributing to forming several of the projects in the centre is discussed before the main part of the chapter describes how the topics of interest among the centre’s industrial partners have evolved during the centre’s project period. To discuss the main research topics in the centre Chat GPT 3.5 has been applied to extract and categorise topics based on a large number of yearly meeting minutes with the industrial partners. The topics have been categorised into eight major areas, reflecting the research areas in the centre. These areas, materials and processing; additive manufacturing; automation and robotics; digitalisation; organisation; lean and quality control; global challenges; and sustainability, are briefly discussed in separate sections in this chapter. The chapter ends with a short description of how the following chapters in this publication reflect the industrial partners’ topics of interest.
