Chantal Kopf, a Green Party member of the Bundestag, visits Hochschule Offenburg
Rector Prof. Dr. Stephan Trahasch welcomed Chantal Kopf (Alliance 90/The Greens), the representative for the Freiburg constituency in the German Bundestag, as well as the members of the Ortenau Greens’ district executive committee who were also present: Lena Mohr (Chair), Elisabeth Schilli, Dagmar Wenger, and Sylvia Dorn (committee members), who were also present, at the Work-Life Robotics Institute at Hochschule Offenburg.
The discussions initially focused on European university alliances. Stephan Trahasch introduced Chantal Kopf to the ChallengeEU university alliance, founded by Hochschule Offenburg together with eight partners. The spokesperson for European policy for the Green Party’s Bundestag parliamentary group agreed with the president that university alliances such as ChallengeEU are an important and successful tool at the European level for creating a common higher education area and promoting democracy in Europe.
The second part of the discussion focused on how research findings can be more quickly translated into marketable applications, products, and services. The establishment of the German Applied Research Association (DAFG), agreed upon in the coalition agreement, plays a key role in this regard. This is a milestone that the Universities of Applied Sciences (HAW)—which include Hochschule Offenburg—have been advocating for more than a decade. “Now it all comes down to the details: The DAFG needs reliable, full funding from the federal government and inclusion in the Pact for Research and Innovation. Then it can sustainably secure application-oriented research at the HAWs and significantly accelerate innovation,” Trahasch emphasized.
The rector referred to the recent position paper by the University Alliance for Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises, which is based on an evaluation of 88 technology transfer funding programs. Its key demands—end-to-end funding chains instead of isolated projects, appropriate framework conditions for universities of applied sciences and small and medium-sized enterprises, a focus on commercialization from the outset, as well as greater flexibility and speed—align with the experiences of Hochschule Offenburg: Where funding is conceived as a continuous process, research results more quickly lead to innovations for SMEs and strong regional innovation ecosystems.
A subsequent tour of the Work-Life Robotics Institute illustrated how Hochschule Offenburg collaborates with companies in applied research and technology transfer, and what positive impacts this has on the economy and, consequently, on life in the region.
Until now, the Central Innovation Program for SMEs (ZIM) has played a key role in this collaboration between the University and businesses. The sudden and unexpected suspension of applications for this funding by the Federal Ministry of Economics just a few days ago means that, for Hochschule Offenburg, numerous planned joint research and development projects—which are of central importance to the region’s competitiveness as a business hub—are now unexpectedly at risk.
“We need reliability and speed to keep pace technologically in global competition in fields such as robotics. “I’ve gained many interesting insights into the specific support the University needs at various political levels to maintain meaningful international collaborations—such as the European university alliance ChallengeEU—and to put its impressive research findings into practice,” said Chantal Kopf as she took her leave.