Campus GmbH/Moll

Ecosystem

Growing Ecosystem – RWTH Aachen Campus

The Innovation Factory is based on the ecosystem RWTH Aachen Campus, which has produced a fruitful collaboration between academia and industry. The campus is globally outstanding in its professional and spatial dimension.

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Long Research Tradition

RWTH Aachen University was founded by the German emperor Wilhelm I of Prussia in 1870 as a polytechnic university to significantly drive industrialization.

In the early 1950s, the number of students began to grow from initially 1,000 to currently over 45,000 and the upward trend is continuing. RWTH Aachen is one of the world’s leading technical universities and renowned specifically for its outstanding engineering expertise. In addition to the 260 institutes at RWTH Aachen, there are numerous external research institutes represented on campus today.

Successful Industry Cooperation

The high regard in which RWTH Aachen is held, is partly due to intensive cooperative partnerships with the industry for many years. As a result of these successes, some first large-scale institutes began leaving the city center in the mid-1970s to relocate to the university expansion area Melaten. By the mid-1980s, the university hospital moved to its new premises in the immediate vicinity.

In 2009, the new RWTH Aachen Campus laid the foundation for today’s development. Growing numbers of industry businesses seek space for a presence on campus and private investors build the necessary, state-of-the-art premises on public land to accommodate them.

Space, Research, Diversity

In terms of space, the initiative is based on the expansion areas Campus Melaten and Campus West. In terms of content, the scope of work represented at RWTH Aachen far surpass the scope of any traditional technical university. Interdisciplinary teams of academics work closely with industry consortia on groundbreaking and visionary solution approaches in the newly created centers to answer the core questions of our time with regard to the future.

But the concept of the Innovation Factory goes one step further: Its central focus is on a better, faster and leaner implementation of innovation.

There are currently more than 360 companies active on RWTH Aachen Campus, and the numbers continue to grow. These include multinationals, hidden champions from the mid-size segment, right up to highly specialized small businesses and startups. More and more of these businesses create their own incubators and accelerators, whose growth is powered by the recruitment of first rate graduates from Aachen universities.

Campus GmbH/opentopomap

Academia and industry are creating an ecosystem on RWTH Aachen Campus

Campus GmbH

The Innovation Factory rounds off the campus concept and bridges the gap between academia and industry