A funding boost for materials research in Germany
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aterials research in Germany www.bmbf.de/en
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aterials scientists and engineers in Germany can look forward to a healthy injection of funding following the launch of a government program to help stimulate product development using new materials. Germany’s Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) notes that materials can account for almost half of production costs in the manufacturing industry. And since making innovative materials is slow and expensive (development cycles of 10 to 15 years are not uncommon), the German government is keen to give the process a helping hand. This new program, named “From Material to Innovation,” will run for a decade, providing researchers with about €100 million a year. According to Herbert Zeisel, Deputy Director-General for Key Technologies for Growth at the BMBF, the program aims to strengthen Germany’s competitiveness and establish materials expertise in German industry. According to BMBF, around 5 million people in the country work in materials-based industries. “The
aim is to involve small- and medium-sized enterprises in the innovation process even more heavily than in the past and to train young research talent,” says Zeisel. He says that they are looking particularly to major fields such as energy, transport, medicine, and construction. Each year the ministry will announce more detailed themes on which each round of funding will be focused. The program will be administered by Project Management Jülich. This program is part of Germany’s High-Tech Strategy, aimed at making the country a global leader in innovation, and the wider Industrie 4.0, or fourth industrial revolution, which is based around smart factories. It replaces a similar materials initiative that ran in the 10 years leading up to 2014, with €900 million. Funding like this is particularly important in Germany, where commodities tend to be expensive, putting extra pressure on firms to reduce their resource consumption. More than two-thirds of the companies that received funding under the
Catalyst materials for the chemical industry (courtesy of BASF SE).
MRS BULLETIN
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VOLUME 40 • AUGUST 2015
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www.mrs.org/bulletin
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NEWS & ANALYSIS SCIENCE POLICY products,” he says. However, he also notes that “we have a very good system in Germany for getting companies going with seed money… but conditions are worse than the US [United States] for venture capital funding.” Traditionally, European researchers have also been slower to commercialize their work than scientists in the United States. “University research in Germany is to some extent more fundamental, while in the US it is more application-driven,” says Schierle-Arndt. By encouraging closer collaboration through funding streams like this latest one, the German government hopes to change that.
“I hope that it will also strengthen material science at universities in general,” says Claudia Felser from the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Physics of Solids in Dresden. She observes that technical universities are the ones that tend to have materials
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