Added Value for the Region

In the meantime, the first master’s graduates have completed their studies at TUM Campus Heilbronn. “The city has gained an important educational factor with the center,” emphasizes Prof. Kiesmüller. In addition, the CDT has become an important interface between companies in the region and research.

With its work, the Center for Digital Transformation provides the optimal framework. It is based on fundamental and application-based research that is constantly being developed through close collaboration with partners on campus and renowned partner universities. 

For Prof. Kiesmüller, one thing is certain: “Knowledge transfer is very important to us.” That’s why the CDT regularly hosts workshops with leading scientists and also networking events with companies. One example is the Supply Chain Finance Hub, which was held for the fourth time in October 2022 as a virtual event with high-profile panelists led by Prof. David Wuttke. Most recently with 200 participants, including managers and executives from companies and banks as well as researchers and students from 25 countries.

But participation in external events in the region is also an important component of this knowledge transfer. StartupCity meets Experts is, without a doubt, one of these important events. Here, Martin Meißner, member of the CDT and Professor of Digital Marketing at TUM Campus Heilbronn, among others, gave interesting insights into his research on the topic of “eye tracking” last year.

Under the motto “For the Digital Age,” TUM Campus Heilbronn continues to push ahead with its expansion. “With the addition of the professorships TUM School of Computation, Information and Technology (CIT) and the Data Science Center, we will also be working more closely with computer scientists in the future,” says Prof. Kiesmüller. “This opens up completely new possibilities for us, for example with regard to the fields of data science and artificial intelligence.” One of the next steps will be to build a comprehensive network with companies in the Heilbronn-Franconia region. “Our research offers a great deal of added value that we want to make available to companies in order to jointly master the challenges of digital transformation,” she adds.

One current project at the CDT, for example, deals with the topic of natural language processing. Here, a team led by Prof. Sebastian Müller, Professor of Finance and new CDT Director, is using methods that, with the help of machine learning, are able to automatically take into account the semantics and context of a text. This may one day make it possible for companies to identify relevant competitors simply by comparing annual reports or their websites.