Knowledge Generation – Knowledge Transfer

A few years ago, Empa developed a first tool to support knowledge transfer, namely the Empa Academy. In various types of events, the Academy offers the Empa knowledge to a growing audience. Reciprocally, the Academy invites guest speakers as specialists to stimulate discussions and support continuous formation of the Empa staff and guests. Soon, the Academy together with library and other services will form a general knowledge management unit. Printed products like this report «Activities 2003», the Empa Annual Report and the periodically published «empaNews» are well established transfer tools. In addition, a new brochure called «Reise in die Welt des Nanometers» (Journey into the World of Nanometers) for high-school level has recently been created and is at the disposal for whoever requests it. Quality control of newly generated scientific knowledge is a necessary task but far from easy. High level journals with good peer review systems and rapid editorial work are available for science and technology domains with a well developed culture of publication. In some engineering fields, especially in civil engineering, this particular culture is not worldwide well developed yet; delays are still the same as in the pre-IT-times. The visibility of Empa’s performance is suffering from this lack of culture, foremost due to Empa’s rather high amount of engineering activities.

We are proud of the achieved scientific output 2003 as 60 PhD studies are in progress, more than 120 SCI/E publications have appeared and 12 patents have been submitted. Our goal for the near future remains intact, namely that each scientist generates knowledge worth publishing in a high quality paper, and this once a year.

We are active on five levels, with

1. the international science and technology community, by means of high quality journals, books and conferences
2. partners from the public and private sectors, many of which are SMEs
3. eager and motivated citizens and politicians
4. teaching activities and PhD formation
5. Empa staff, for improving interdisciplinarity across different departments and laboratories.

You can download our report as PDF file (3.3 MB). If you wish you can also order the printed version online.