The aim of the funding is to complement the university's scientific excellence with excellent start-up support within the university, thereby also transferring the potential into products, services and ultimately young companies, so-called spin-offs. To this end, the university's Transfer Center enaCom will use the highly endowed funding to sustainably expand its activities.
The six clusters of excellence and transdisciplinary research areas at the University of Bonn offer enormous potential for new ideas, innovative technologies and solutions for the challenges of the present and the future. Spin-offs from the university represent one of the possibilities for transferring research findings into practice.
The new funding project "U BO GROW" ties in with the entrepreneurial commitment within the Faculty of Agriculture, among other things. With the planned Institute for Sustainable Technologies and Entrepreneurship, in which several chairs are to be bundled and a new professorship for Entrepreneurial Behavior is also to be established, a university-wide focus is being developed.
In addition, new laboratory space will allow founding teams to experimentally validate ideas and develop prototypes without delay. This closes a gap in the university's internal innovation process. Promising start-up ideas are to be identified at an early stage by proactive support from the Transfer Center enaCom and further developed with a view to what is happening in the market. The focus of the support is on market analysis, market development strategy, business development and company building.
This focus on preparing start-ups for market entry ties in directly with the existing funding for start-up support under the "EXIST Potentials" program of the German Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology.