Transfer
The UA Ruhr jointly promotes knowledge transfer, innovation and business start-ups, thus making a contribution to the Ruhr area’s structural transformation. The University Alliance is representative of the fact that the Ruhr area is turning from an industrial into a knowledge-driven region. By fostering research-based start-ups, building networks between academia and industry and offering further education for qualified specialists, we empower the Ruhr area to meet the challenges and advance the transformation processes of the 21st century. Our transfer-related activities fall under the following categories:
Support for start-ups
Thanks to its diverse higher education landscape and multitude of businesses, the Ruhr area presents a fertile environment for start-ups. With its initiatives designed to support start-ups, the UA Ruhr helps drive knowledge transfer, entrepreneurship and innovation in the region.
Founder Initiative Ruhr
The Founder Initiative Ruhr was established in 2017 as a joint UA Ruhr platform for coordinating initiatives in the field of support for starting a company, coordinating the transfer of knowledge and technology, and for setting up new projects. The aim is to increase the Ruhr area’s visibility as a region for start-ups and transfer, and to establish a network that connects researchers, businesses and investors.
Memorandum of Understanding with BRYCK
Since 2023, the UA Ruhr has been cooperating with the BRYCK start-up and innovation hub initiated by the RAG-Stiftung foundation, whose support programs have already helped numerous start-ups in fields such as energy, health and hydrogen. The BRYCK network connects researchers, founders and businesses. Its cooperation with the UA Ruhr is intended to sustainably strengthen the start-up ecosystem and boost the number of new enterprises in the Ruhr area.
Knowledge transfer
With further education initiatives such as the Ruhr School of Design Thinking and the EUREF-Talent Campus, the UA Ruhr engages to boost innovation in the Ruhr area.
Ruhr School of Design Thinking
The Ruhr School of Design Thinking aims to shape the structural transformation in the Ruhr area through interdisciplinary, innovative and transfer-focused teaching and research. It is a space where institutions and businesses from the region as well as ten chairs of the UA Ruhr universities collaborate under the slogan “Converting industrial culture into a culture of innovation.” They show how design thinking can be used as a method in teaching, research and business in order to accompany the digital and social transformation processes in the Ruhr area.
EUREF-Talent-Campus
Together with the Hochschule Düsseldorf – University of Applied Sciences, the UA Ruhr is planning to offer four international continuing education study programs in order to equip qualified specialists with the skills necessary for the energy transition. On the EUREF-Talent Campus in Düsseldorf, continuing education programs on future-oriented topics such as energy, transformation and mobility providing specialized knowledge on sustainable technologies will be offered for the first time ever, starting in 2025.
Industry relations
The UA Ruhr jointly cooperates with the Initiativkreis Ruhr business association and companies around the region in order to deepen the exchange between industry and academia in the Ruhr area.
Initiativkreis Ruhr
Since 2016, the three UA Ruhr universities have been members of the Initiativkreis Ruhr, a business association comprising over 70 companies and institutions in the Ruhr area. Together, the Initiativkreis Ruhr constitutes a strong network that implements projects that drive the social and economic transformation of the region.
CEO Dialog
The CEO Dialog is a series of events jointly organized by the UA Ruhr and the Initiativkreis Ruhr. It brings students and Chief Executive Officers from the Ruhr area together to discuss business-related topics and challenges, thus encouraging exchange between industry and the qualified specialists of the future. Initiated in 2017, the event was held for the tenth time in 2023.
Ruhr Fellowship Program
Each year since 2012, the Ruhr Fellowship Program has allowed 20 students from the United States to gather intercultural, linguistic and professional experience as part of an intensive program in the Ruhr area. As one component of this, the students do an internship in one of the leading businesses in the region.
Wirtschaftskolleg at the Research Academy Ruhr
For the Wirtschaftskolleg event at the Research Academy Ruhr, doctoral candidates, postdoctoral researchers and representatives from industry and the public come together, providing the early career researchers with first-hand information on career opportunities outside academia.
Honors and awards
Forum Junge Spitzenforschung award
In the Forum Junge Spitzenforschung science competition, early career researchers from the Ruhr area present ideas that can be applied in practice and innovative approaches to challenges industry is currently faced with. The award will be granted for the first time in 2024 by TU Dortmund University’s Centrum für Entrepreneurship & Transfer (CET) and TU concept GmbH. In the future, researchers from the Ruhr metropolitan region are to be given the opportunity to present their projects to a jury composed of experts from academia and industry once every year. The competition is sponsored by the Stiftung Industrieforschung foundation.
Triple success for UA Ruhr at the Innovation Prize NRW 2023
Since 2008, the state of North Rhine-Westphalia has been awarding the Innovation Prize to people who enable economic progress in its territory by means of practice-oriented solutions to problems, a spirit of innovation and expertise. In 2023, the UA Ruhr received the main prize, which was awarded to biophysicist Prof. Dr. Klaus Gerwert (Ruhr University Bochum). Furthermore, two of our start-ups were granted prizes in the “innovation2market” and “innovation4transformation” categories. After the Federal President’s Deutscher Zukunftspreis, the Innovation Prize NRW comes with the highest prize money of any recognition of its kind in Germany.
