Linking the joint projects in a network

Events and mailing lists

Regular events for all those being funded under r² served as a platform for personal contacts and enabled a targeted exchange of specialist information between the research groups. The kick-off conference in 2009 was followed by annual status seminars. The topics of sustainability assessment and service models were handled in greater depth in two additional workshops.

To help diffuse the results, the integration and transfer project supported the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and the Projektträger Jülich by organising r²-specific forums and workshops at several conferences. Links to the wider environment were additionally supported by a calendar of other related events from outside the funding initiative. The events are documented in the Archive.

For the r²-funding recipients, email lists were compiled with different thematic focuses. These were then used to keep those on them up to date with events, calls for tenders etc. The Fraunhofer ICT coordinated the distribution of information which meant that contents could be pooled and allocated to specific target groups.

Actively determining networking potentials

A network supervisor from the team of the integration and transfer project was available for each r² project. This key account approach promoted the targeted exchange of information between the project groups and the integration and transfer project. An important task was to actively identify networking potentials between the r² projects. Based on the interest shown by the project groups and a uniformly structured information base for each r² project, the supervisors drew up hypotheses about where specific networking points might occur between the project groups.

This networking potential was processed in a matrix, sent back to the coordinators and explored in greater depth in "technology exchanges" as part of the regular status seminars.

One successful example is the networking between the joint projects Shredder sand, Extracting residues from mining waste and Building aggregates. This examined whether the mineral by-products which are formed when reclaiming metal from shredder sands or from copper shale mine dumps are suitable for use in the construction sector.