News

concrete In June 2020 the foundation stone for the world's first building made of carbon concrete, called CUBE, was laid in Dresden. Interested parties now have the opportunity to experience the building digitally. The CUBE serves as a demonstrator for various applications of carbon concrete. One of them is the integrated heating function of carbon concrete components. Their possible applications, business model approaches and market requirements are being evaluated by an interdisciplinary research team of the group Business Models: Engineering and Innovation in the project "C³InteF". Fraunhofer IMW project leader Josephine Schöffel says: "By placing a heatable wall surface (C³InteF) in the world's first building made of carbon concrete, the multifunctionality of carbon concrete as a construction material can be illustrated".

The German government has from 2010 incorporated the future project "The CO2-neutral, energy-efficient and climate-adapted city" in its high-tech strategy. Since then, the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft's "Morgenstadt Initiative" has been developing solutions for the city of the future with over ten institutes. This has been coordinated by the Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Engineering IAO together with partners from industry and local authorities. In the publication "Sustainable Cities and Regions. A new strategy for the broad-based implementation of sustainable urban development in Germany", the experts present their findings from ten years of systems research.

Digital technologies worldwide are becoming more prevalent in the agriculture industry. This includes fruit and wine growing where numerous smart farming approaches offer new solutions to old problems. Used in the right place, these could, among other things, help to conserve resources and decisively improve the environmental balance in crop cultivation.

The promotion of bilateral cooperation between Germany and Israel and developing innovation strategies - this was the aim of two workshops organised by the Innovation Policy Group in April 2020.

How can small and mid-sized companies use the current crisis as an opportunity to build future-oriented changes? Which role does digitalization play in this process? Professor Thorsten Posselt, Institute Director at Fraunhofer IMW, provides some answers to these questions in the interview with “ARBEIT UND LEBEN SCHSEN e. V.”

Researchers of the Professionalization of Knowledge Transfer Processes Unit are planning a creative workshop with different Leipzig based partners for the project SPARCS (Sustainable energy Positive & zero cARbon CommunitieS). The project partners want to work out a vision for the city of Leipzig in 2050 and together with representatives of relevant organizations come up with a normative target image in the form of texts and graphics. The focus of the so-called "City Vision 2050" is on urban governance, the digital city, urban transport, energy and housing.

At the end of 2019, the Fraunhofer IMW Innovation Acceptance Unit and the Fraunhofer ISC organized a German-Italian symposium to discuss and further develop concepts with the goal of protecting cultural heritage from the effects of climate change. The digitization of cultural heritage, for example, the use of digital twins for damage and material analysis, was one of the four main topics of the symposium. The Fraunhofer IMW Innovation Acceptance Unit moderated the main topic „Cultural Heritage and Society”, during which they also presented the results of a study on the social value of cultural heritage. Now, Fraunhofer IMW has issued a conference volume that combines lectures from the international experts in attendance.

The "Center for Digital Work", which recently began its work, is a think tank of the Federal Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs (BMAS) and five regional "future centers" in eastern German federal states. It promotes the transfer of knowledge between small and medium-sized enterprises and research institutions on digital and demographic changes in the labour market.

About 100 project partners from Germany and Greece will get together in Berlin on 1 and 2 April 2020 to exchange the interim research results of their projects and their concepts for knowledge and technology transfer.