30 students learned about digitalisation at the Evergreen Lectures

Digitalisation is a key topic for the future of the timber industry. Keywords such as data mining, remote sensing and Industry 4.0 fit in with this. This year's Evergreen Lectures Berkeley Executive Institute course in Vienna was dedicated precisely to this. It enables Austrian students to learn from international experts and to network with other fields of study. For the third time, the Evergreen Private Foundation engaged the renowned UC Berkeley professor, Gregory La Blanc.

Prof. La Blanc always manages to convey in a practical and entertaining way how digitalisation is turning industries upside down. This year he once again inspired 30 motivated course participants with his insights.

"Digitalisation is a topic that is also becoming increasingly important in the woodworking industry," says Evergreen Lectures project manager Hannes Plackner. "Companies must succeed in digitalising their business models in order to remain successful in the long term. Of course, this also applies to the forestry and timber sector."

For this reason, the HS Timber Group management team awarded three places to dedicated HS Timber Group employees this time. From Vienna, Michael Eder (CTO) was there, from Germany Benjamin Gnieser (Management Assistant), from Romania Ionuț Batir (Lean Manager/Process Engineer). They were selected following an internal nomination process.

And they were also able to take away a lot from the course. Michael Eder says: "The course was 'mindblowing', especially the input that production companies should also become a software company to make data-based decisions."

Benjamin Gnieser also took a lot away: "The Evergreen Lectures with Professor La Blanc were a unique event, full of excitement and with a lot of innovative spirit. When interdisciplinary teams work on the future, a lot can happen. I hope that the Evergreen Lectures will continue to bring many ideas for shaping the future and that sustainable networks will be formed."

Ionut Batir concluded: "We found that we were talking about data science not as something that is yet to come, but as a phenomenon that already exists and is being used extensively by the world's most successful companies. In these three days, we have seen examples of companies that have built their entire business on data analytics, even though it is not their core business. Why shouldn't we do the same in the timber industry?"

The Evergreen Private Foundation specifically promotes innovation in the forestry/wood sector. The means of choice is to bring the up-and-coming generation of the industry together with other innovative industries. This is also the case with the Evergreen Lectures: half of the participants come from the forestry/wood sector and half from other fields of study. This automatically leads to thinking outside of the box.

The Evergreen Lectures course is not open to everyone. From the large number of applicants for the course, the most motivated and best were selected. The course ends with a certificate from the Berkeley Executive Institute.

The Vienna University of Technology once again provided us with modern seminar rooms and great support with the organisation. The certificate ceremony took place on the final day in the festive ambience of the festival hall.