Scientific cooperation engineering

As an interdisciplinary research network, the Cluster of Excellence (CoE) comprises of scientific disciplines ranging from mechanical engineering to computer sciences as well as finally tackling social sciences like sociology and psychology. This interdisciplinary diversity is accompanied by a structural spreading: The 25 participating organizations from five departments and around 150 scientists are allocated around the entire campus of RWTH Aachen University. Hence, many of the CoEs employees are faced with new forms of cooperation in terms of competences, knowledge, heterogeneous objectives of institutions and actors. As there is a continuous staff turnover in science, a sustainable process for the integration of actors in the research network is requested. Scientific Cooperation Engineering addresses the challenge of interdisciplinary cooperation in the CoE and aims at fostering interdisciplinarity and its synergies as a source of innovation in research processes. Therefore, the project researches means of reaching an organizational development from temporal structures to a sustainable network in production technology.