Technology Transfer at the Alfred Wegener Institute
The Alfred Wegener Institute is active in Climate Research and contributes to understand complex marine and polar ecosystems. Most of these activities are basic research with high public relevance.
Beside these primary tasks, increasing efforts are undertaken at the AWI to promote the transfer of know-how and innovative technologies into commercial use. The motivation to do so can be explained as follows:
- A sustainable, environmentally compatible management of natural resources can only be realized by transferring innovative technologies from research providers to industry. With its specific know-how the AWI contributes not only inside academia but also on other societal fields to face the challenges of ecologic and climate changes.
- Powerful and sophisticated research infrastructures and platforms can only be developed, procured and run in close co-operation with skilled partners from the private sector. For this purpose, the AWI maintains regional, inter-regional and international collaborations with companies.
- In view of decreasing basic funding and increasing competition in fund raising, respectively, there is a growing necessity to acquire additional investment, e.g. by licensing and public private partnerships.
- By means of license and innovative R&D partnerships, the institute contributes to strengthen regional economic structures and the maritime economy.
- By technology transfer activities, the AWI together with other scientific institutions significantly contributes to restructure the region Bremen-Bremerhaven towards an innovative maritime high-tech area. Doing so, spin-offs and the attraction of companies is important beside licensing and industry co-operations.
According to its scientific profile characterized by Geo, Climate, and Biosciences and the Helmholtz-Max-Planck Joint Research Group Deep-Sea Ecology and Technologies (see AWI Organization Chart), the AWI is active on the following R&D fields:
In close cooperation with the University of Applied Sciences Bremerhaven and funded by the Local State Bremen, several themes from the mentioned fields were clustered within the foundation of imare, the Institute for Marine Resources.
At the AWI, technology Transfer is understood as a trans-sectional task supported by the AWI transfer office. Subsequent to the management of inventions and intellectual property rights (IPRs) as a primary step, technologies and innovations are transferred into commercial use by licensing, private public partnerships as well as by spin-offs.
