New AiF e.V. Chief Executive to visit FILK Freiberg

Since the summer, the new Chief Executive of the AiF, Professor Klein, has been touring Germany to get to know his member associations and, of course, they him. Last Friday he stopped in Freiberg and visited our research association and our institute.

When Prof. Klein took over the AiF's fortunes in June, he did not face an easy task: the Central Innovation Programme for SMEs (ZIM), the flagship of the BMWK's SME funding, has reopened after almost nine months of application freeze, but with significantly higher access barriers. The contract between AiF and BMWK for the administration of Industrielle Gemeinschaftsforschung (IGF) has been terminated, and the future is currently uncertain.

And so the informal talks with our managing directors, Prof Michael Meyer and ProfHaiko Schulz, revolved primarily around the future of our innovation community, the globally unique network of research associations and their approximately 25,000 small and medium-sized researching member companies.

Enormous social and economic transformations lie ahead of us. In order for industrial SMEs to be able to cope with them, new potential for value creation must be continuously identified and exploited. And this happens with #research and #innovation as it is carried out in the research associations of the AiF, with economic relevance for SMEs, because ultimately they embody the AiF across all industrial sectors. In the end, industrial SMEs contribute to the solution of upcoming future tasks such as the energy transition, new mobility, climate and environmental protection or sustainable management. As a member of the AiF, we also stand by this.

Before his journey continued to our colleagues at the IHD in Dresden, Prof Klein was able to gain an impression of our range of topics in materials research during a short excursion into the research laboratories and pilot plants of our institute: Functional material systems and smart materials for very different industries, use of bio-based raw materials, collagen research for the medical and pharmaceutical industry.

We would like to thank Prof Klein for the interesting and refreshing exchange and wish him a lot of energy, perseverance and always the right amount of humour for his tasks.