Berlin, Germany’s capital, brings together history and innovation in a special way. Photonics and optical technologies have a long tradition in the Berlin-Brandenburg region: Siemens, Osram and AEG Berlin have been brightly illuminating the “City of Light” for more than 100 years and are world leading in many fields. Last week, secpho had the pleasure to discover the versatile faces of Berlin and its neighbour region Brandenburg by visiting partner clusters from European Projects, as well as potential collaboration partners, startups and SMEs for upcoming projects and activities.
It was a great chance to explore the history and future projects of Berlin-Brandenburg’s optics and photonics network and to gain some insights from other sectors, such as health, food and agriculture as well as mobility, transport and logistics. Thanks to this visit, we were able to get an idea of Berlin-Brandenburg’s common innovation strategy of both federal states, that represents something unique among the 16 German federal states.
secpho’s Berlin-Brandenburg tour started at Adlershof, the largest science and technology park in Germany. Our partner Frank Lerch, Manager of the Optics and Photonics Cluster OpTecBB (one of our EPRISE consortium partners), helped us discover the former birthplace of German aviation and nowadays innovation, as Berlin-Brandenburg’s top Science, Business and Media hub. Moreover, we visited Gerrit Rössler, head of Photonics Unit, and Silvia Bensel, Innovation Project Manager for Optics and Photonics, from Berlin Partner, the economic development agency from the region Berlin. Frank and Gerrit explained to us that nearly 400 technology companies and more than 30 university and non-university research institutes research and develop high-tech components, systems and products in Berlin for the world market. One example of Berlin based photonics companies is XPLORAYTION GmbH, co-founded by Bernhard Hesse and Christian Seim in 2017, that facilitates access to non-destructive X-ray based analytics at the highest sensitivities and spatial resolutions.
Berlin Partner is one of the founding partners of the Innovation Network for Advanced Materials (INAM), so we consequently met Susana Santos, Business Developer & Scientific Advisor, who granted us some insights about INAM: It is an ecosystem for high-tech businesses working in different fields of Science and Advanced Material, helping to find innovative solutions for high-tech challenges by bringing together startups, established corporates and research institutes focused on advanced materials. Check out their current open innovation challenges by clicking here.
Talking of startups, a funny coincidence brought us to OPSIN, as their new employee Jordi Morales-Dalmau happens to be a former PhD student at ICFO. Thus, we used the opportunity to visit Jordi and the co-founders Jan Saam and Nina Buffi and were able to learn more about their open bioprocessing platform as the operating system of modern biotechnology. Those of you, who would like to meet OSPIN, could join us at our DIGI-B-CUBE sectoral workshop, that will take place on 3 October at the Hospital Germans Trias i Pujol.
Last but not least, we had a cross-sectorial cluster meeting at the Economic Development Agency from the region Brandenburg (WFBB) in Potsdam with Detmar Leitow, Manager of the Cluster Food Industry; Juliane Reimer, Manager of the Cluster Transport, Mobility and Logistics; Anne Techen, Manager of the Optics and Photonics Cluster; and Christin Wienhold, responsable for Cluster Internationalization. A great opportunity to exchange our experiences and challenges and to discover common points of interest for potential collaboration in future.
All in all, it was an inspiring week in Berlin-Brandenburg, whose key to the success is the strong research environment, with its close ties to local industry. We look forward to returning soon, accompanied by some of our member companies.