Building bridges to the Far East

This press release is also available in German.

"There are many reasons why Fraunhofer should go to Korea," states Fraunhofer president Hans-Jörg Bullinger. "The purely human factors, for a start: We have a lot in common with the Koreans. Like the Germans, they are industrious, single-minded achievers. They live in a divided country – as we did for many decades. Korea is also the ideal location for a research organization like Fraunhofer: The economy is growing steadily by about five percent a year. The state annually invests 2.9 percent of the gross domestic product in research and development. And, last but not least, Korea has a more than average quota of well-trained and highly motivated engineers."

The Koreans, adds the Fraunhofer president, possess valuable know-how and are therefore the ideal research partners: "We complement one another in numerous areas, for instance in flat-screen technology, microelectronics, communication technology and mechanical engineering."

Scientists and engineers from the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft have been closely cooperating with Korean research establishments and industrial companies for several years already. The Fraunhofer Institute for Open Communication Systems FOKUS in Berlin, for example, has a cooperative agreement with Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology – the think tank of the Samsung corporation. The members of the German/Korean team are working together to devise technologies for markets beyond tomorrow – examples being 4th-generation mobile radio and "smart homes".