Innovation Mall for companies

Knowledge is a headstart

Innovation Mall for companies: University presents its research prowess online

As a partner for applied research, Hochschule BonnRhein-Sieg has a lot to offer. But what exactly and under what conditions? And who is the right person to contact? This is not always easy for companies to find out. They will find what they are looking for on the Innovation Mall website.

The website is Hochschule Bonn-Rhein-Sieg’s latest project to visualise and communicate its know-how. The Centre for Science and Technology Transfer (ZWT) has been supporting the university’s activities in research and transfer for ten years. “We see ourselves as the university’s central sales unit in the entrepreneurial sense,” says Sascha Czornohus, director of the ZWT. And as such, it was time to present the university’s range of activities in a new way – visible and easily accessible to businesses – “a mall of knowledge” where companies can find appropriate services for their development needs from the university.

Think cooperation

The Innovation Mall currently covers around 60 application-focused research fields in seven different areas of research. Visitors can enter two showrooms on the fields of visualisation and security research in virtual 360-degree tours – with the aim of making research accessible. Under the heading Best Practice, the Innovation Mall presents selected research projects and successful cooperation partnerships between universities and companies. These include the “Food Protects” project, in which the university is developing marketable real-time sensors for the meat industry together with companies from Germany and the Netherlands. They are designed to detect bacterial infestation as early as possible and prevent food spoilage. In 2020/21, a total of 130 collaboration projects with partners in practice were implemented.

This range of information on the web enables the ZWT to show that H-BRS is a powerful partner, especially for small and medium-sized enterprises that do not have large R&D infrastructures. This applies both to classic contract research and to projects within the framework of public funding programmes. “The formula is: potential case for application plus research topic plus funding equals innovation support for practice,” explains Sascha Czornohus.

More: The Innovation Mall is part of the “Campus to World” project, funded by the federal states’ initiative Innovative Higher Education www.innovationmall.de The Centre for Science and Technology Transfer introduces itself