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Transfer made in Germany Jordanian universities would like offices modelled on those of the H-BRS Centre for Science and Technology Transfer Jordan‘s Yarmouk University in cooperation with twelve academic and industrial partners. As one of four European universities, H-BRS shares its experience in establishing and successfully operating technology transfer offices (TTOs). The aim of this joint work is to set up offices along the same lines at four Jordanian universities. A possible model for this is the Centre for Science and Technology Transfer (ZWT) at H-BRS as it has developed from a small office to a powerful institution over the last 20 years.
Successful: The Centre for Science and Technology Transfer supports networking between university, economy and society
Research should promote innovation, initiate development and bring benefits to society and industry. This attitude is a matter of course at a German university of applied sciences. The situation is quite different in other countries. “In the Jordanian higher education system, only isolated contacts to regional industry exist”, says Professor Rainer Herpers, Co-Director of the Institute of Visual Computing at Hochschule Bonn-Rhein-Sieg. Conversely, Jordanian industry has little access to and knowledge of the topics and content being developed and studied at higher education institutions.
German blueprint for Jordan The cooperation project “Building Innovation Infrastructure via Technology Transfer Offices Conducted in Jordan Higher Education Institutions”, or BITTCOIN-Jo for short, aims to change this. 70,000 euros from the European Union will be allocated to Hochschule Bonn-Rhein-Sieg for this project over the next three years alone. It is being carried out by
In September 2019, the project partners met in Sankt Augustin to become acquainted with the workings of ZWT. The programme also included interactive workshops on the transfer of European models to the Jordanian framework and a presentation by the Centre for Entrepreneurship, Innovation and SMEs (CENTIM) at the Rheinbach campus. “The Jordanian partners were particularly interested in the promotion of entrepreneurial activity at the universities”, says Herpers, “in order to make a long-term contribution to the regional and supraregional development of the Jordanian economy”. The result of the meeting was a first model for a Jordanian TTO based on the German model. This was further elaborated at the follow-up meeting in March 2020 in L‘Aquila, Italy. More information: http://www.bittcoin-jo.com
