Aligning Academic Knowledge and Industrial Needs to Enable Efficient Research Transfer in the Context of Digitization

In the context of the Industrie 4.0, the integration of interdisciplinary competences becomes an essential prerequisite for innovation. Especially small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) need support in the form of access to relevant experts and infrastructure available at research institutes. Thus, this paper examines whether research institutes in Germany are currently able to cover the industry's need for digitization expertise and how they need to evolve to better support SMEs during the development of digital products. In order to answer these research questions, the competence demand of SMEs and the supply by the research landscape are compared. On this basis, gaps are identified. The focus of the analysis is on the development of digital products in Germany. Based on concrete project examples, influencing factors for successful knowledge transfer will be discussed and recommendations derived.