Innovative together

Transfer

The UA Ruhr jointly promotes knowledge transfer, innovation and business start-ups and so contributes to the Ruhr area’s structural transformation from an industrial into a knowledge-driven region. By fostering research-based start-ups, building networks between academia and industry and providing further education for qualified specialists, we empower the Ruhr area to meet the challenges and advance the transformation processes of the 21st century.

Support for Start-Ups

Thanks to its diverse higher education landscape and multitude of businesses, the Ruhr area offers a fertile environment for start-ups. With its start-up support initiatives, the UA Ruhr helps drive knowledge transfer, entrepreneurship and innovation in the region.

Graphic photo montage showing a person with their hands stretched out in front of them in the foreground. Above their hands are the words “Startup” and numerous symbols from science and technology.

Founder Initiative Ruhr

Group of six people with the rectors of the UA Ruhr universities, representatives of the RAG-Stiftung and BRYCK

Cooperation with BRYCK

Knowledge Transfer

With further education initiatives such as the Ruhr School of Design Thinking and the EUREF-Talent Campus, the UA Ruhr is committed to promoting innovation in the Ruhr area.

Ruhr School of Design Thinking

A field with wind turbines in the background and solar modules on the right.

EUREF Talent Campus

Industry Relations

The UA Ruhr works together with the Initiativkreis Ruhr business association and companies in the region in order to deepen the exchange between industry and academia in the Ruhr area.

Initiativkreis Ruhr

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CEO Dialog

World map in the style of a print on crumpled fabric with a flight route from New York to the Ruhr area marked on it

Ruhr Fellowship Program

Wirtschaftskolleg at the Research Academy Ruhr

connecting.ruhr

Honors and Awards

Forum Junge Spitzenforschung Award

In the Forum Junge Spitzenforschung science competition, early career researchers from the Ruhr area present practical ideas and innovative approaches to current challenges of the industry. The award was granted for the first time in 2024 by TU Dortmund University’s Center for Entrepreneurship & Transfer (CET) and TU concept GmbH. In the future, researchers from the Ruhr metropolitan region will have the opportunity to present their projects to a jury composed of experts from academia and industry once a year. The competition is sponsored by the Stiftung Industrieforschung foundation.

Triple Success for the UA Ruhr at the Innovation Prize 2023

Since 2008, the state of North Rhine-Westphalia has been awarding the Innovation Prize to people who enable economic progress in its territory through practice-oriented solutions to problems, a spirit of innovation and expertise. In 2023, the UA Ruhr received the main prize, which was awarded to biophysicist Prof. Dr. Klaus Gerwert (Ruhr University Bochum). Furthermore, two of our start-ups were granted prizes in the “innovation2market” and “innovation4transformation” categories. The Innovation Prize NRW is the highest endowed award of its kind in Germany after the Federal President's Deutscher Zukunftspreis.

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