The national programme COMET (Competence Centers for Excellent Technologies) was launched in 2006. The competence centres programmes are internationally recognised as best-practice model and have been among the most successful technology policy initiatives in Austria. COMET Competence Centres conduct application-oriented cutting-edge research at the highest level.
The COMET Programme
The COMET Programme bundles scientific competence and technological know-how in very specific thematic areas. In the Centres, companies and research partners work closely together and thus enable direct transfer of new knowledge into market-ready products and services.
COMET Centres set research impulses and initiate new innovations for products, processes and service. As a result, they significantly improve the capacity for innovation of companies and help to develop solutions for key issues of the future, such as climate protection, digitalisation, mobility and health. They strengthen Austria as a research and business location and have a great importance for the education of young scientists.
COMET Centres are funded by the Republic of Austria and the participating provinces as well as the involved companies and research organisations. Science and economy jointly define a research programme with a medium to long term perspective, the implementation and success of which is evaluated. The COMET Programme is, on the part of the federal government, financed by the Federal Ministry of Labour and Economy and the Federal Ministry for Climate Action, Environment, Energy, Mobility, Innovation and Technology and processed by the Austrian Research Promotion Agency.
COMET consists of three programme lines:
- COMET Projects support the entry in the COMET Programme in order to work on new ideas in the area of cooperative research.
- COMET Centres (K1) perform cutting-edge research on the highest level and build competences and human resources.
- COMET Centres (K2) had their final call for tender in 2018.
- COMET Modules open-up new areas of particularly high-risk-research for a COMET Centre.
From COMET Project to COMET Centre to COMET Modules, the degree of novelty in science and thereby the strategic orientation is increasing.
Since 1998 the COMET forerunner programmes Kplus and K_ind/K_net have, with their 45 Austrian centres and networks, established central research competences in science-industry cooperation. The “Best Of” these two programmes continues since 2005/2006 under the name COMET.
The COMET Network
Detailed information:
- Factsheet COMET Programme (English version)
- Programme Document COMET (September 2020, English version)
- Programme Document COMET (April 2020, English version)
- Programme Document COMET (January 2016, English version)
- Programme Document COMET (December 2014, English version)
- Evaluation Concept (January 2016)
- Scientific Paper "Enhancement of the next generation of Competence Centre Programmes (CCPs)".
- (The paper was presented at the "University-Industry-Interaction Conference" (7-9 June 2017, Dublin) and is based on the final report of a TAFTIE Task Force focussing on „Competence Centres“
Some of the linked PDF-documents are not fully barrier-free accessible. The Austrian Research Promotion Agency is working on providing barrier free version of the documents. If you need a barrier free version of one of the linked documents, please contact the COMET-Team.
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