Baden-Württemberg – Ontario
The cooperation agreement covering the field of research and education that has existed since 1990 is pivotal for the partnership between Baden-Württemberg and Ontario. It has engendered a successful student exchange project, the Ontario/Baden-Württemberg Student Exchange Program, which offers 50 students a year on both sides the opportunity of spending an academic year at one of the participating partner universities. A shorter research sojourn in the summer is also possible. The exchange program’s main office in Canada is at York University, while the Auslandsreferat at Konstanz University assumes most of the responsibility in Germany. This was also where the big festive event marking the 20th anniversary of the cooperation agreement between Ontario and Baden-Württemberg took place in summer 2010. Currently, 14 Canadian and 9 German universities are involved in the program.
Roughly 2,000 Canadian and German students have meanwhile benefited from the exchange program. Baden-Württemberg is particularly popular among students from Canada. Almost one in three of the Canadian students living in Germany attend a higher education institution in that southwestern state. Only recently, a new component was added to the Ontario/Baden-Württemberg Student Exchange Program: the Faculty Mobility Program is targeted at postdoctoral scholars, junior professors or up-and-coming team leaders in all departments who have several years of independent research activity behind them. They can apply for scholarships that enable them to initiate or implement a research project in one of the two partner countries.
Bavaria – Québec
The partnership that has existed between Bavaria and Québec Province since 1989 focuses on economics. The main task of the Bavarian Office, which is headquartered in Montréal, is to support Canadian enterprises. The office promotes collaboration between Bavarian and Canadian companies and for this purpose also helps to organize visits to Bavaria for entrepreneurs. There the office organizes, among other things, meetings with official agencies and authorities, professional associations and chambers of trade and commerce. Economic links are very diverse: more than 20 Canadian companies have now set up subsidiaries in Bavaria, including big concerns like Nortel, Magna International, Alcan, and innovative companies such as the graphics card specialist Matrox, whose German headquarters is in Unterhaching near Munich. The partnership between the Cité de la Biotech in Laval and Bayern Innovativ, the Bavarian technology transfer centre devoted, among other things, to biotechnology, also places great emphasis on innovation.
Among the outstanding biotechnology locations in Germany is the Martinsried campus near the Bavarian capital, Munich. The first Cluster Forum Bavaria-Québec took place in Munich in late November 2010, when experts, primarily from the fields of biotechnology and information and communication technology, had an opportunity to exchange ideas. The Bavarian-Canadian partnership also promotes innovation at university level with a special focus on material sciences. Here a partnership has already been established between the École Polytechnique in Montréal and the University of Bayreuth.
Saxony – Alberta
Right from the beginning, research cooperation was one of the focal points of the regional partnership between Saxony and Alberta, which was set up in 2002. At university level, the Technische Universität Dresden, the Technische Universität Bergakademie Freiberg, the Technische Universität Chemnitz and the Universität Leipzig have been engaging in intense academic dialog with the universities of Alberta and Calgary, in the form of workshops, research projects, guest lectures and exchange and excursion programs. The collaboration between the departments of dental medicine at the University of Alberta and the Technische Universität Dresden is outstanding and has promoted student exchange for ten years now. During a visit to Alberta in 2010, Saxony’s Minister President Stanislaw Tillich encouraged additional cooperation in medical research, also pointing to environmental technology, nanotechnology and biotechnology as further key areas in Saxony that could benefit from additional research and economic cooperation. Silicon Saxony, the largest microelectronic cluster in Europe, is in the eastern German state of Saxony.
The new Alberta-Saxony Intercultural Internship Alliance is targeted at students and graduates in the fields of education, business and culture and runs until the end of 2012. The exchange program enables scholarship holders to do practical training in one of the two partner regions and thus aims to facilitate valuable contacts for the future. What is more, Saxony wants to consolidate relations with another Canadian province in coming years. In November 2010 a business delegation from the Québec Ministry for Economic Development, Innovation and Export Trade traveled to Saxony to discuss the possibilities for collaboration between the two regions.////
