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Panoramic view on the North Campus © Jürgen Huhn​/​TU Dortmund
Transfer and Entrepreneurship to be third pillar alongside Research and Teaching

TU Dortmund University Receives 20 Million Euro Grant from NRW as “Excellence Start-up Center”

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Group photo, a man holds a certificate in his hands © Ralph Sondermann
Minister Pinkwart (2nd fr R) congratulated TU Dortmund University, represented by, among others, Chancellor Albrecht Ehlers (3rd fr R) and Professor Andreas Liening (4th fr L).
TU Dortmund University is an “Excellence Start-up Center”: Late Thursday evening, it was announced that the university had won the grant competition of the state of NRW. Over a period of five years, around 20 million euros will be made available to enable TU Dortmund University to increase the number and quality of innovative spin-offs and to optimally support start-ups.

“I am delighted about this tremendous success. We owe it to the continuous development work within our university,” said Albrecht Ehlers, Chancellor of TU Dortmund University.  “Transfer and entrepreneurship shall constitute the third pillar of the university alongside research and teaching. In recent years we have created the necessary structures and filled them with life,” said Professor Ursula Gather, President of TU Dortmund University. 

Already in the 1980s, TU Dortmund University was one of the initiators of the neighboring technology park. In 2005 the professorship for Entrepreneurship and Economic Education was created, and in 2012 the start-up support was systematically anchored in the university with the founding initiative “tu>startup”.  In 2017, the Center for Entrepreneurship & Transfer (CET) was established as a central institution for the promotion of start-ups and the transfer of technology and knowledge. “Together, we now want to establish a new start-up culture that has a strong impact far beyond Dortmund,” said Professor Andreas Liening, Dean of the Faculty of Economics and Business Administration and CET Board Member.

With the grant for TU Dortmund University, the state of NRW acknowledges the concept of significantly increasing the number of high-tech start-ups with four defined transfer clusters and a broad regional network. The plans to considerably expand the university infrastructure for start-ups were also convincing. A makerspace and a dataspace as well as coworking and seminar rooms are to be created for this purpose. With transfer scouts, the existing ideas and technologies within the faculties are to be identified even better than before and developed for potential spin-offs. Another aspect of the application is the inclusion of local SMEs in the activities of the Excellence Start-up Center.

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