From Laboratory into Practice - German Approach for Accelerating the Transfer of Innovative Materials in Civil Engineering

Abstract

Seven partners from research, industry and standardisation have joined forces to accelerate the transfer of innovative materials from the laboratory scale to practice. Within a support project called “WiTraBau – Knowledge Transfer into the Construction Industry” (“Wissenstransfer im Bauwesen”) funded by the “German Federal Ministry of Education and Research” (BMBF, “Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung”) strategies are developed to accelerate the availability of new technologies. In a first step the results of recently completed research projects are identified and assigned to an appropriate transfer strategy (e.g. discussion in standard bodies or working groups, preparation of guidelines, publications and documents for education). In a further step a transfer strategy is worked out for running research projects in order to support the research consortia regarding an optimized transfer of the results achieved during the project period.

The authors focus on the methods which are used to evaluate the transfer strategies and introduce the first successful transfer results. The applicability of the methodology is suitable for all European and international countries as well as for research institutes.