The doctoral workshop is a crucial element of the IEEE E-TEMS conference series, aiming to engage researchers in the early stages of their research work. This report discusses the implementation of the workshop in 2023, which was the first on-site workshop in the conference series. The submitted and presented research projects are presented, addressing the following topics: 'Restorative Social Justice through Digital Transformation in South African Metropolitan Cities', 'Understanding the Future Role of Energy Communities in Renewable System Integration', 'Developing a framework for analysis of Virtual District Models for planning and operation of district energy systems', 'Digital twins to improve Social Sustainability in Smart Cities', 'An integrated digital twin for city resources consumption optimisation', and 'Automated Technology adoption to accelerate technology adoption'. These thematic areas provide a foundation for collaborative discussions and knowledge exchange among the workshop participants, fostering interdisciplinary exploration and potential synergies. At the end, all participants give a short reflection on their experience of the workshop.

Rather than representing a technological leap forward, Industry 5.0 actually nests the Industry 4.0 approach in a broader context, providing regenerative purpose and directionality to the technological transformation of industrial production for people-planet-prosperity [1]. Consequently, Industry 5.0 can be considered as the new engine of the economic and societal transition with a societal concept which can mean more distributed well-being with human-centric and sustainable, resilient industry. The advantage of the learning factory concept therefore lies in the combination of the realistic factory environment, processes and transparency of the structured activities which can provide testing of new features, modules, functionalities, tools, and technologies based on the existing Industry 4.0 framework. Especially, the concepts of implementing new business models with benchmarking emphasise the major difference in achievable results. Transition to a circular economy can only be achieved if up-skilling and re-skilling of workers can also be done which is the core function of the learning factory.