Toyota, UPHF and INSA Hauts-de-France sign a partnership

Jim Crosbie, President of Toyota Motor Manufacturing France, Professor Abdelhakim Artiba, President of UPHF and Professor Armel de la Bourdonnaye, Director of INSA Hauts-de-France represented by Professor Mirentxu Dubar, Director of Corporate Relations, signed a partnership agreement this Tuesday, September 14 to prepare for the future.

Building on a collaboration that has been strengthened for many years, particularly on education and training, the Yaris production site and the University wish to go further to prepare together for the challenges of tomorrow.

"The world is changing at great speed and we must prepare for it and surround ourselves with the best partners to support us in this transition. We will develop more collaborative projects with the University to share our expertise, skills and technologies.", said Jim Crosbie.

This partnership is focused on 3 major axes : teaching and training, research and innovation and event cooperation.

Some teams from Toyota Motor Manufacturing France will have access to the University's continuing education and/or apprenticeship programs in key areas of innovative activities: logistics, artificial intelligence, the IoT (connected devices), augmented reality for maintenance, process digitization and cyber security. The partners also plan to work on organizational knowledge creation, managerial innovations as well as employee sociology.

To seal the new partnership, Toyota handed the university the keys to a Yaris Hybrid. The vehicle will become an experimental platform for training courses dealing with networks and telecommunications and cyber defense. It will also find its full use in training and research on embedded systems.

The Toyota Onnaing/Valenciennes site, INSA Hauts-de-France and the University have the ambition to become, each in their fields, centers of excellence. To achieve this goal, they will develop sustainably hand in hand.