From 27 to 30 November, 2017, the Luxembourg Chamber of Commerce, in collaboration with the Ministry of the Economy, the Ministry of Finance, the Luxembourg Embassy in Tokyo and the Luxembourg Trade and Investment Office in Tokyo organised an official economic mission during the State Visit of HRH the Grand Duke of Luxembourg. At this event a Digital Economy seminar was held: “Luxembourg & Japan – A Shared Digital Future”, which included David Foy, Head of Sector Development, Digital Economy, Luxinnovation and Joost Ortjens, Head of Sector Development, Automotive, Luxinnovation amongst others.
The economic mission to Japan was led by Etienne Schneider, Deputy Prime Minister, Minister of the Economy and Pierre Gramegna, Minister of Finance. The trade delegation, led by the Luxembourg Chamber of Commerce, was made up of 84 representatives of 53 companies and organisations from different sectors. Never before had such a large Luxembourg delegation visited Japan, where several agreements have been signed. The audio-visual, automotive, ICT, logistics, sustainable finance, space and tourism sectors were the focus of these exchanges.
On 27 November high level players in Digital Economy from both Luxembourg and Japan came together for a discussion about “Luxembourg & Japan – A Shared Digital Future” with the purpose of encouraging knowledge sharing and networking between corporate executives, departmental heads and technology managers.
Digital economy & Smart Mobility
David Foy and Joost Ortjens led a seminar on Digital economy & Smart Mobility promoting the two economic areas during the same event. Led by Luxinnovation and organised around practical cases presented by Luxembourg companies (CHAMP Cargosystems and POST), the seminar highlighted the strengths of Luxembourg’s communication infrastructure, data centres and the High Performance Computing project. The Luxembourg automotive sector was presented, with particular emphasis on the “testbed for connected vehicles” project, jointly led by Luxembourg, Germany and France.
The programme was an excellent opportunity to demonstrate Luxembourg’s competence and included a presentation on “Luxembourg Infrastructure, European Centre of Excellence” from
Claude Demuth, CEO, Lu-Cix, a case study on, “CHAMP Cargo Technology on Data Collection and Management” by Arnaud Lambert, CEO, CHAMP Cargosystems and a “Presentation of Luxembourg POST Telecom and M2M” by Cliff Konsbruck, Director, Post Telecom.
The topics are extremely important ones for Luxembourg and Luxinnovation, as they form integral parts of the road map of the country’s economic future. Discussions focussed on big data, High Performance Computing and connected cars and devices, with an aim of extending the participants knowledge about the current state-of-the-art innovation in Japan and Luxembourg and how this work will enhance lives in the future.
“We were pleased to see such a large turnout at this event which was aimed at sharing experiences in our respective digital economies,” says David Foy. “To be honest we were a little worried about what Luxembourg could bring to the table faced with some of the incredible innovations from the hosts. However the audience offered good feedback on the projects exposed by the Luxembourg delegation and many new contacts were made both in pure “digital” but also in autonomous driving fields. Our Japanese counterparts presented some very interesting use cases in HPC and showed great interest in continuing talks with our HPC project team. We managed to impress with our infrastructure initiatives and the value proposition of Luxembourg in general. I’m sure that we will see much more interaction with Japan in the follow up to this mission. “