Connecting link for the transport of ideas: Contract research by GNF
For Lutz Hippe the many partners on site make this location worth its weight in gold. For instance, if he needs special analytical investigations, he need only go to the building next door or two floors down: “Infrastructure and communication facilities are ideal for us here.” Two years ago Hippe took the chair for GNF, a registered society for the promotion of scientific and engineering research in Berlin-Adlershof.
“Alone the name expresses the helplessness we felt twenty years ago,” confessed Hippe’s predecessor Klaus Richter. “We” were a good twenty scientists in the late autumn of 1990, most of them employees of the recently liquidated Academy of Sciences. They didn’t just discuss the name, their prime concern was considerably more, was fundamental: “We had to undertake something, even though it was unclear at the beginning what exactly.”
Klaus Richter, professor of physical chemistry, is an eminent authority in the field of catalysis. For over twenty years he worked at Leuna, before heading in 1981 the Berlin-Adlershof analytical centre AZB of the Academy of Sciences. Then came Reunification and Richter’s institute was liquidated. Many of his colleagues perceived this time to be a rupture. If you didn’t dare to hive off or find work at another institute, you were on the verge of unemployment.
For research itself this was a trend without negative consequences. On the contrary, concluded Lutz Hippe, “it was liberating; we could cast off our fetters; there was nobody making our decisions for us.” Of the companies that were then hived off the institutes, many today are leaders on their markets. The institute under Klaus Richter’s responsibility served to found three successor institutes that “obeyed necessity, and not necessarily their needs”. The six employees working for GNF in 1990 have now grown to twenty.
The first order was for the further development of a heating chamber, a project run by the German research organisation DFG. This organisation sees itself as a link connecting research and SMEs. Its objective is to provide the findings of basic research, in particular to companies without their own R&D department, so that they can utilise these findings for the production of innovative products and the introduction of new modern methods. Today, the chemists, physicists and engineers at GNF conduct research in three disciplines: “building chemicals”, “surfactant chemistry” and “adsorbents and water”, mostly commissioned by medium sized enterprises.
Also, GNF utilises its contacts of old, e.g. with Leuna, the former employer of Richter and Hippe. For Lutz Hippe this has led to a network of partners: companies and institutions that GNF repeatedly collaborates with. Over the twenty years following its setup, GNF has evolved into an acknowledged nonuniversity, non profit making research institute.
A success story? Klaus Richter passes sober judgement: “That would be half a step too high.” Lutz Hippe does not quite share this opinion and explained that the last of the companies that had started with a great outcry was a long time ago.
by Richard Wolter