They establish what are usually called practice areas, competence centers, service lines, or areas of expertise.
The science ministry's funding program EXIST supports five regional competence centers that follow a quite similar approach to interconnecting academia and industry.
Markus Breitbach of the Machine to Machine Competence Center at Deutsche Telekom said that his firm was helping to bring all the parts of the Urban OS together.
At Siemens Corporate Technology, mathematicians (who also constitute about 8% of degree holders) tackle risk through computer modelling, according to Albert Gilg, Competence Center department head at Siemens in Munich.
Intelligent System (IS) technologies are receiving much attention in a wide range of process engineering applications from plant operations to enterprise-wide competence centers.
To address these goals a project collaboration was installed within Siemens, including Automation & Drives, Large Drives as a leading supplier of electrical machines, Corporate Technology as a competence center for superconducting technology, and other partners.
Although the existence of such competence centers is no guarantee of successful teamwork between academic research and industrial partners, they make it much easier for young scientists to take the first steps toward a career in industry and also to find know-how and local support for their ideas.
And given the fact that most of the nearly 14,000 knowledge- and technology-based organizations have their roots at the university, the strategy of creating local competence centers appears to be a promising way to bridge gaps and to facilitate the transition into job life after graduation.
Herbert Tilg is supported by the excellence initiative (Competence Centers for Excellent Technologies - COMET) of the Austrian Research Promotion Agency FFG: Research Center of Excellence in Vascular Ageing Tyrol, VASCage (K-Project Nr. 843536) funded by the BMVIT, BMWFW, the Wirtschaftsagentur Wien and the Standortagentur Tirol.
Fifty five consecutive SSc patients including 49 women (median age 54.2±12.5 years), all fulfilling the revised American College of Rheumatology (ACR) criteria for SSc were included in a cross sectional study in two French SSc competence centers by using the same screening protocol [15].
We thank Fredrik Nilsson, from Region Skåne Competence Center, for statistical support.
