Assembling the Ingredients for Success

The first Hamburg Conference of the German-British Forum, in association with the Hamburg City Government, the Hamburg Chamber of Commerce and Die Welt, offered an opportunity to discuss the outlook for manufacturing companies across a wider Europe.

Three years after the bursting of the stock market bubble, many industry sectors with their roots in traditional manufacturing areas started to discover new reasons for optimism. Partly, this reflected a new consensus among governments and in society at large that, without broadly-based and competitive manufacturing industries, there can be no sustainable path to growth and prosperity.

The conference was based on the premise that manufacturing is crucial to the future of the European economy and concentrated on three broad themes: financing growth, motivating the workforce and driving innovation. In an increasingly competitive world, the aim is to find examples of industrial best practice, running across geographical and product boundaries, that can be applied to improve manufacturing excellence in a range of sectors.