EU Activities at the FIR at RWTH Aachen University

Alongside cooperation projects on a national level, the FIR is involved in numerous projects funded by the European Commission with partners from all over Europe. The EU-Practice is the coordinating body between the research areas within our institute as well as with our European actors and networks. Across all research areas, the EU-Practice supports in the selection of relevant calls for proposals and in the management of the application process as well as in the establishment and administration of our international network. The EU-Practice is a 5-person team from each FIR research area and a full-time officer as coordinator.

Summarized, “the EU-Practice creates the optimal conditions for successful EU applications and a strong placement of the FIR in the European environment."

Successes

In 2020, the FIR successfully completed the first half of its EU project "INEDIT". In "INEDIT", a Europe-wide co-creation platform for the sustainable development of furniture is being developed. This was done through interdisciplinary collaboration between end customers and specialists along the value chain. The business model concept for the platform, developed by the FIR, was applied to four different pilot use cases of the project in 2021. Furthermore, the design of processes and user interactions on the INEDIT platform was accompanied by the FIR.

Despite the challenge of the Corona pandemic, we were represented in numerous EU digital workshops, such as the EFFRA Working Groups on the new Horizon Europe research program, and placed our innovative vision there.

Outlook 2022 and team expansion

In 2022, the European research activities underwent an intensive phase. With a total of eight EU proposals, the FIR reached a record application phase until the end of April. The topics spread from agriculture to the monetization of data to automation in production along our four departments of Business Transformation, Information Management, Production Management and Service Management.

Since March, there is further support from the newly created research area of Smart Work. The topics around "Working and Learning in Industry 4.0" are anchored as essential points in Horizon Europe and now, at the FIR as well. Thus, we are confident that we will cope well with the many proposal activities in the new program.

In this sense, we are looking forward to any cooperation with our team and international partners on Horizon Europe!