TU Graz has been a member of the European university alliance Unite! since November 2022. With its eponymous seed fund, Unite! awards start-up funding every six months to support innovative ideas and projects and to promote international cooperation between students, researchers and lecturers from all nine partner universities. TU Graz was very successful in the seed fund calls of the 2023/24 funding period. It took the lead in seven of the nine approved projects in the categories Teaching & Learning and Research & PhD and received funding totalling around 230,000 euros. TU Graz also scored highly in the current 2024 seed fund call, which supports student activities. Even before the official submission deadline, it was given the green light for one of the four successful student projects.
Joint success in EU funding programmes
Unite! universities have many similarities in their research specialisms. If they join forces there, the chances of success in calls for European funding programmes increase. This is what happened under the leadership of TU Graz in the “DIGITAL Europe Programme”. This funding programme aims to drive and shape the digital transformation in Europe, with a focus on companies, citizens and administration. Under the leadership of TU Graz, GreenChips-EDU, an international project that brings together 15 universities, companies and research institutions with the aim of training urgently needed specialists for the semiconductor industry, was recently successful. The EU is funding this education campaign for sustainable microchips made in Europe to the tune of 7.15 million euros. Project manager Bernd Deutschmann was able to win over no fewer than six Unite! universities for this project.
The EU research funding programme Horizon Europe focuses in the “Widening” funding line on ensuring scientific excellence in all member states of the European Union and increasing the participation of so-called Widening countries, i.e. those member states that are less active in research and innovation, in Horizon Europe. With two members in Portugal and Poland, the Unite! alliance includes universities from Widening countries. In the EU project “Unite! Widening”, all nine Unite! universities, including TU Graz, are represented as partners as are two science and technology parks, a development agency and an innovation management company. The science, research and academic expertise of the universities are complemented by the innovation, industry and business experience of the non-academic partners in order to achieve the objectives of the European Excellence Initiative (EEI).
