German university-industry Link Sets the Benchmark

Last week I visited LTI, the Lighting Technology Institute at KIT, the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. The institute has three professors, 30 scientific PhD students, and more than 45 undergraduates. I spent a wonderful half day with Professor Cornelius Neumann, Director of General and Automotive lighting. He showed me the most interesting facilities and introduced me to several students working on their PhDs. More information on their research subjects will be detailed in one of our forthcoming newsletters.

I was impressed by two sturdy structural aspects of the Institute:

- The very close involvement of the automotive lighting industry in the university.
All 7 PhD students I have seen were working on concrete projects of lighting which will interest OEMs and lighting suppliers and will open for these young people the door to their first job.
- The very strong link between the university and the industry concerning automotive lighting and probably all the industries, illustrated by the fact that Cornelius Neumann is a former manager of Hella with a deep industrial experience in automotive lighting technology—as Prof. Schmidt-Clausen in his day, or Prof. Khanh at Darmstadt, or Alexander Von Hoffmann at Nuremberg.
Prof. Neumann knows very well the needs of the industry, is up to date on even the slightest details about current evolutions of the environment, ADB, matrix beam, interior lighting, components, and simulations including the influence of deformation on the lighting pattern.

Such a relationship between universities and industries is more important now than ever before—really, it is a must—and shows the right pattern to succeed. All the countries have to take example from this kind of organisation even if it takes a long time to build that kind of cooperation. I think especially about France where there is some effort to build this kind of link but we have not this culture and we will need a long time before somebody from the industry chooses—and is allowed—to become a university professor. German university engineers are educated by senior engineers to be practically employable even before they get their jobs.
French universities educate their students to have a broad theoretical knowledge and rely on the industry to give them the practical knowledge.

Fortunately, new venues for exchange of ideas are propelling us towards more coöperative linkages. Driving Vision News is one such medium, of course, with the weekly news and analysis, the reports, and the workshops. But also the increasing number of events where we can meet to share new ideas and perspectives we might not have encountered before. See our coverage this week of the Optis Lighting Materials & Design Conference, and watch soon for our coverage of IFAL just completed in China.

Sincerely yours,
Hector Fratty
DVN Editor in Chief