Since 2015, eight flagship market competitions—each with two rounds of calls for proposals—have made a significant contribution to promoting innovation and, thereby, to the future growth of North Rhine-Westphalia’s economic strength. In the first round of calls for proposals alone, a total of approximately 250 million euros in funding was provided from the ERDF and the state budget of North Rhine-Westphalia. The imminent end of this funding instrument, which is so important for North Rhine-Westphalia, has prompted us to take a special look in this magazine at the projects behind public research funding.
Thus, the current NMWP magazine not only provides valuable insight and an overview of current research and development projects in the field of NMWP key technologies, but also serves as a good barometer of the activities of the NMWP.NRW cluster. The projects presented here were all developed within the NMWP.NRW cluster, meaning that our stakeholders and the cluster office were key enablers and drivers of these projects. And I hope you’ll agree with me that this represents a fantastic achievement with great potential for NRW’s future. It should be added that we have organized the articles in the NMWP Magazine according to the principle of “blended networking”: All authors in the magazine and all speakers at the R&D sessions of the 8th NRW Nano Conference have a profile on the NMWP portal (portal.nmwp.de) and can therefore be contacted with minimal effort.
You can also get a firsthand impression of the projects and the companies, research institutions, and people behind them during the “Leitmarkt.NRW” and “ROCKET” sessions at the 8th NRW Nano Conference.
I hope this issue of NMWP Magazine will inspire you to shape the future with your own innovation project. We’re happy to help and firmly believe that we can still support even “project pros” and surprise them with new ideas and approaches. Here and there, we can always add a “little something extra” to increase your chances of success, both in the application process and in implementation. Contact us—we’re happy to take on the challenge.