Another Three Years of Additional Funding
The commission also praised the performance center for its highly professional governance and management structure as well as its extraordinary efforts to recruit junior staff and train internal and external employees. »We are delighted with the outstanding assessment of our performance center and our work. It proves that Kaiserslautern is a location for the future and that we can achieve a lot with our collaborations,« says Dr. Konrad Steiner, Managing Director of the High-Performance Center Simulation and Software-based Innovation, and looks to the future with optimism: »Thanks to this result, we have secured additional funding from the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft for the next three years!«
Background: High Performance Centers at Fraunhofer and Evaluation Procedures
High-performance centers are cooperation projects initiated by Fraunhofer to deepen regionally specific research priorities with the aim of increasing the impact of R&D projects in industry and society. To this end, universities, colleges, Fraunhofer Institutes and other non-university research institutions work together with companies and social stakeholders on specific topics at one location. They bring together suitable partners and support ideas all the way to the market.
In recent years, the performance centers have established themselves as spearheads for transfer and forges of good practice. A so-called »omnibus model« enables a competitive system with annual performance evaluation and a consistent focus on results. The first round of the competition started at the beginning of 2022 with a three-year term up to and including 2024. Based on the cumulative results of the annual performance evaluations (2022, 2023, 2024) and under the basic principle of »the best remain«, five performance centers will now be eliminated at the end of the term and four new consortia will take their place in the second round of the competition from 2025.
