With its leading position in the High-Tech-Industries and scientific research and with its many more innovative industry sectors, Karlsruhe offers an ideal location for ambitious enterpreneurs who strive for market-leadership.
Companies and institutes based in Karlsruhe have realised the great advantages that can be drawn from clustering in an early stage and have thus established a vivid, flexible and successful network of clusters within and throughout Karlsruhe´s most advanced and internationally renowned High-Tech-Industries.
The European network CLOE - Clusters Linked Over Europe -which was founded in Karlsruhe upon an EU initiative in 2004, paved the way into the European market for many local enterprises and enabled the regions represented in the cluster to establish close links between their highly developed sectors and to boost economic development. In order to optimise the work and effects of clusters world-wide, the CLOE alliance has elaborated a guide for professional cluster management.
As the Lead Partner and initiator of the CLOE alliance, Karlsruhe provides access to its many regional and supraregional clusters, such as IT2Rhine which links the highly developed IT sectors of the Upper Rhine region in France, Germany and Switzerland. Furthermore, the Automotive Engineering Network offers a communication platform and marketplace for the automotive industry of Karlsruhe and its surrounding regions. By collaborating with the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) - a co-operation of the University of Karlsruhe, which was ranked as one of Germany's top universities, and the research centre - AEN fosters research in the automotive engineering sector and thus stimulates the emergence of new innovations.
Through its involvement in Karlsruhe's leading industries, through its collaboration with the University of Karlsruhe and through constant exchange with other international research centres, the KIT unites the three most important strategic fields of research, teaching and innovation, making Karlsruhe the birthplace of many successful innovative enterprises and contributing largely to Karlsruhe's reputation as one of the top locations for research and innovation. One of KIT's most recent and future-oriented projects is its contribution to the establishment of InnoEnergy, the first European network dedicated to the development of new innovations for a sustainable and effective energy supply. The project coordinated by the KIT and the "Knowledge and Innovation Community" unites 35 universities, research institutes and business schools and thus offers a broad network for further education, innovation and production in the sustainable energy sector.
To further promote Karlsruhe's potential as an important supplier of sustainable energy, the region's providers of renewable energies have united in the cluster Energieforum Karlsruhe, fostering new future-oriented concepts for the efficient use of energy supply. Probably the most well-known cluster based in Karlsruhe is the CyberForum, which offers a community of exchange, collaboration and consulting for High-Tech-Enterprises. Since early 2010 the network with more than 800 members belongs to Germany's Cluster of Excellence "Embedded Software", participating in the development of new software methods and technologies and taking responsibility for all IT activities of the region.
With all these highly efficient networks and with the new focus set on future-oriented topics like intelligent mobility and the development of software as a service to society - realised in the recently introduced initiative "Smarter Cities" - Karlsruhe is turning into a Living Lab, bringing innovation closer to its people and integrating the whole society in its contribution to the world's progress in research and development of new technologies.
Important links:
www.clusterforum.org
www.it2rhine.com
www.ae-network.de
www.kit.edu
www.energieforum-karlsruhe.de
www.cyberforum.de
Contact persons:
Ralf Eichhorn: ralf.eichhorn@wifoe.karlsruhe.de
Nicole Walther: nicole.walther@wifoe.karlsruhe.de
23 August 2010
