Karlsruhe Institute of Technology: Digitization: regional research alliance ForDigital as a pointer for the future

The research alliance ForDigital (“Digitization: Transformation of Socio-Economic Processes”) started in 2016 with the aim of better understanding the mechanisms and effects of the rapid development of information and communication technologies (ICT) on the economy, society and individuals and providing innovative ICT solutions for them to design. To this end, scientists from the University of Mannheim and KIT, in close cooperation with regional partner institutions, tackled 81 joint projects from different specialist disciplines.

ForDigital has created cross-location and interdisciplinary collaborations that make a positive contribution to the networking of researchers in Baden-Württemberg – and generate impulses for the future through the bundling of competencies. These projects were funded by the Ministry of Science, Research and Art of the State of Baden-Württemberg with almost 900,000 euros.

“With ForDigital we have succeeded in establishing a regionally anchored interdisciplinary collaboration between researchers in the field of digitization. This can be quantified in concrete terms, for example, in the form of ForDigital follow-up projects with a total third-party funding volume of 9.1 million euros, ”says Alexander Mädche from the Institute for Information Systems and Marketing at KIT and spokesman for the ForDigital research alliance.

The resulting research collaborations represent a great enrichment in terms of content and method for all those involved and offer a sustainable basis for the continuation and further development of the cross-location collaboration even after the end of ForDigital’s term.