Ernst Burgbacher, Parliamentary State Secretary at the German Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology and Federal Government Commissioner for SMEs and Tourism, has awarded the title of "Bundeslogo Kompetenzzentrum" to the Competence Centre for Technology and Innovation Management of the Upper Franconia Chamber of Crafts in Bayreuth.
The competence centre received funding from the German Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology totalling 3.575 million Euro and about 1.8 million Euro each from the Free State of Bavaria and from the Chamber of Crafts. The tasks at the new competence centre include, amongst other things, the development of testing procedures for materials based on nanotechnology and the use of state-of-the-art control technologies for energy houses with the aim of rendering these applicable by the crafts and the development of continuing education courses.
State Secretary Burgbacher stated, "Competence centres are the upper class amongst educational centres. Not only do they provide vocational training and continuing education, but they continuously develop new course proposals. The further development of the educational centre to become a competence centre is exemplary and well honours the Bayreuth Chamber of Crafts's reputation as a technology chamber.
In future, the crafts can maintain their traditionally high status only if they employ modern technology in order to develop new products, processes and services. Therefore, as is the case at the Bayreuth competence centre, the technology transfer between universities and other research institutions ought to be utilised in the crafts to an even greater degree than is hitherto the case, in order to ensure the lasting high standard of products and services in the crafts."
The Bayreuth Competence Centre for Technology and Innovation Management excels due to its holistic approach. This is also the result of an evaluation carried out by the Project and Planning Office Bodensee Konstanz for the Federal Ministry of Economics.
As a rule, competence centres feature certain special fields or focal areas. The competence centre in Bayreuth goes well beyond this. Its focal areas of competence were selected and developed in such a way as to provide links with all departments at the Bildungs- und Technologiezentrum (BTZ - Centre for Education and Technology).
These are the competence fields of information and communication technology, production and processing engineering, control and automation engineering, automotive diagnostics engineering and multimedia distribution centre. For its efforts the BTZ Bayreuth is awarded the title of "Kompetenzzentrum nach den Förderrichtlinien der Bundesregierung" (Competence centre according to the federal government funding guidelines).