Institutions

If a person is suffering from flu or some other type of severe cold, all a doctor needs to do is test a few drops of blood on a sort of cheque card to then know exactly what is wrong with the patient and what type of medicine will be most effective. All this is made possible by a microelectronic bio-chip, developed by a researcher of the Fraunhofer Institute for Silicon Technology in the small German town of Itzehoe. Together with two colleagues from high-tech manufacturers Siemens and Infineon, he is now turning his invention into an innovation – a marketable industrial product. In November, Federal President Horst Köhler paid tribute to the joint development by awarding it the "German Future Prize 2004".

The trademark of the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft (FhG) is applied research in cooperation with industrial companies. Its name is in memory of Munich optician and inventor Joseph Fraunhofer (1787 - 1826). The German federal and Länder governments are the main partners, whose aim is to support research and development projects, especially of small and medium-sized enterprises, through the FhG. In practical terms, only a third of the funds needed by the sixty or so FhG insititutes in Germany are provided by the public sector, with most of the money needing to be generated by the institutes themselves through their work. Currently, the institutes receive contracts worth around 900 million euros a year. This high level of self-financing sets the FhG clearly apart from the other public research organizations in Germany, like the Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, the Helmholtz-Gemeinschaft and the Wissenschaftsgemeinschaft Leibniz, which pursue more fundamental research that is still a long way off reaching market maturity.

The range of research undertaken by the FhG extends from biomedical technology to tool machines and solar power. However, the projects are by no means always product-oriented. For example, the FhG is also interested in workflow organization and optimization. Particularly in technologies which are already highly developed, the rationalization of operating processes represents an additional means of adding value. The FhG is always keen to have its institutes, which in some cases are as big as mid-sized companies, sited close to universities. The Aachen Institute for Production Technology, for instance, employs three hundred people, and in all, 13,000 people work for the FhG. Generally speaking, the directors of the institutes also have chairs at the university, and are selected by joint appointment committees.

Anyone wishing to be successful in the globalized research markets, however, must act and react at the local level. This is why the FhG maintains six research centres, for example for lasers in the USA, as well as several branch offices in South-East Asia. "The key to success internationally are joint ventures with local partners", explains Frieder Meyer-Krahmer from the FhG Institute for Systems and Innovation Research. One example is the Sino-German Mobile Communications Institute in Berlin and Beijing. The FhG also pursues similar cooperation with universities in Scandinavia and Eastern Europe. The next logical step, according to Meyer-Krahmer, is to cooperate with established national industrial partners, particularly within the internal EU market.

"Ultimately, international competition means we must specialize in order to attract European Union research funding ", advises Meyer-Krahmer. "We have to choose our topics of focus such that we can become the market leader!" This is the goal pursued by "institute associations" which work together on particular areas, though from different angles. Such associations have for example already been set up for new materials and in the area of life sciences. The Fraunhofer Information and Communication Group with its 17 participating institutes is currently the largest European research association in this area – and this is precisely the field in which the European Union wants to become the worldwide technology leader by 2010. The Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft is working full steam ahead to achieve this goal.