Saxony, Bohemia and Silesia are collaborating on knowledge transfer to business

Heiko Weckbrodt

Transfer experts in Saxony, Silesia and Bohemia are joining forces to transform research findings into economic success across borders. On an interactive Internet map at map.trans3net.eu, researchers and entrepreneurs can already find 70 different bodies that transfer scientific findings to industry. “In the future, we want to expand this online portal so that each participating university can enter around 30 exciting research findings with potential practical applications,” explains project co-coordinator Melanie Giebel from the CIMTT Center of Production Engineering and Management at TU Dresden. The idea is that businesses and management consultants will then use the portal to pick out projects from the network that are right for them.

The project behind all this is called “TRANS³Net”. It is scheduled to run for three years until June 2019 and is to receive around 1.5 million euros from the EU. The nine project partners are contributing a further 320,000 euros. CIMTT is in charge of the project. The TUD Faculty of Mechanical Science and Engineering founded the Center in 1991 as a way to transfer its research findings into practice more quickly. “Often, it is simply too difficult for many companies to access the latest research,” says Melanie Giebel, speaking about a common experience of CIMTT and the other project partners over the years. She tells us that this is particularly true for small firms that do not have the staff or money to monitor the research scene in their town or indeed further afield – a problem not just in Saxony, but also in North Bohemia and Lower Silesia.

This is where the cross-border network comes in, which the “TRANS³Net” partners hope to further expand by mid-2019. Some success has already been achieved. Multilateral meetings found that although a number of Saxon institutions were already collaborating with Czech or Polish colleagues, there was little contact between Bohemia and Silesia. “That may have been a mentality issue,” believes Melanie Giebel. “In any case, thanks to our project, Czech and Polish partners are now also working more closely together.”

And closer collaboration can only benefit all sides – this is another clear finding from the meetings held so far. The research specialisms and transfer success of Wrocław University of Science and Technology, Technische Universität Dresden, and the University of Ústí nad Labem and the economic strength of the three regions involved vary greatly, according to a TRANS³Net strategy paper. Silesia in particular is currently experiencing strong economic growth, above all in the information technology (IT) sector. The project partners are expecting particularly high demand for innovations from the Wrocław region in the near future. Statistically, Saxony has the best chances of producing such innovations: Here, researchers and developers account for about 1.4 percent of all employees in both the public and private sectors. In the Ústí region, on the other hand, this figure is just 0.2, and in Lower Silesia it is 0.8.

The “TRANS³Net” initiators hope that the growing network of transfer experts will to some extent make up for these differences.
“Our goal is to ensure that this network continues to work and to grow even after the project ends in mid-2019,” stresses Melanie Giebel.

More information is available online at: trans3net.eu.

This article appeared in the Dresdner Universitätsjournal (university newspaper, UJ) 09/2018 of May 15, 2018. The complete issue is available as a free PDF download here. Printed copies and PDF files of the university newspaper can be ordered from  . For more information, please visit universitaetsjournal.de.