The COVID-19 Pandemic has caused an economic breakdown, especially in the manufacturing industry. Manufacturing companies have used Digital service to stay in contact with their customers and as a source of revenue even during the general lockdown An exploratory focus group has been carried out to understand the problems and opportunities manufacturing companies went and are going through and to suggest open research questions that both research and industry should explore further. To deeply analyses the content of the discussion, Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) was used to identify the main research topics. 4 topics were identified as the most relevant to be investigated: digitalization and collaboration emerged as the most interesting trends that will characterize the new normal. For each of the topics, insights, critical points and research questions are presented and discussed, reporting the main evidence of the focus group discussion.