Editorial to the Special Issue Information Integration for Innovative Design and Smart Manufacturing

Information integration is one of the key features to foster innovative design approaches and to enable smart manufacturing in modern companies. Future manufacturing will be more automated, more digitalized, but also more flexible, distributed, networked and collaborative. As a consequence, information integration approaches are necessary to support companies to be innovative and profitable. The issue collects valuable examples of how collaborative approaches and interdisciplinary actions can benefit companies, from new idea co-creation to smart enterprise management, from intelligent data analysis to flexible decision-making, from smart management of business relationships to reconfigurable manufacturing automation.