University Alliance: more funds for research

"Compared to other funding programmes, the support scheme of the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), which is intended to advance research at universities of applied sciences, is massively underfunded," said Professor Hartmut Ihne, President of H-BRS and board member of the University Alliance for SMES (HAfM). On Wednesday, the University Alliance for SMEs took the occasion of a meeting held by SPD members of the Working Committee for Education and Research in the German parliament (Bundestag) to highlight this deficiency.

The Alliance’s criticism focuses, in particular, on the 'FHprofUnt' funding channel, which is intended to support application-related research and development projects conducted by universities of applied sciences in collaboration with SMEs. Since 2006, the BMBF has only granted financing of € 176 million for the funding line introduced in 2006. Over the past few years, a large number of excellent project requests have had to be rejected as a result of the extreme shortage of government funds provided for this programme.  In 2010, € 34.3 million were spent on a total of 129 projects. In 2011, the number of projects was down to 49, for which € 13.5 million were made available. On the other hand, the proportion of requests considered to be worth subsidising rose from 67 percent in 2007 to 82.3 percent in 2011.  The applicants’ low success rate, which – despite high ratings being given to the requests – is currently less than 13 percent, is a cause of considerable frustration among researchers at universities of applied sciences and among the companies and other cooperation partners involved.

Professor Hans-Hennig von Grünberg, President of the Niederrhein University of Applied Sciences and Chair of the University Alliance for SMEs, calls for sustainable improvement, "The problem will not be solved if we raise the total of government funding for the current 2015 financial period by no more than € 4 million. The programme no longer achieves a viable expenditure/success ratio because expenditure on administration is extremely high. Companies' willingness to make financial contributions is thus subsiding considerably. To attain reasonable funding rates, funding has to be at least tripled and the number of qualification criteria reduced."

The University Alliance for SMEs also demands that universities of applied sciences should be more actively involved in advancing the excellence initiative run by the federal government and the federal states. In regional federations in particular, they can play a key role in science and technology transfer. The universities of applied sciences complement the profiles of universities and non-university research institutes along the innovation chain.

The excellence initiative should therefore focus on intelligent research partnerships spanning the various types of universities in the region. Hans-Henning von Grünberg said, "Research at universities of applied sciences has a direct, stimulating effect on the power of small and medium-sized companies to innovate. From this point of view, the subsidies would have a direct incremental value for society and the regional business sector, which can by no means be said about every form of research funding."