Fraunhofer Institute for Mechatronic Systems Design 
Ideentriebwerk room for innovation
IdeenTriebwerk
Long development times, high product complexity, strong competitors and the desire of many customers to be involved in the development process - these are the challenges companies face today in product development. Turn your challenges into opportunities and your ideas into success stories: Our IdeenTriebwerk provides you with a creativity-enhancing work environment for achieving innovation in research and industrial projects.
Concept
We help you to evaluate digital market trends and technologies relevant to your company, provide you with impartial and technology-independent advice and work with you to develop promising commercial approaches and solutions. There is room here for every idea to be explored with little effort, far away from day-to-day business and from doubters. In the process, you will apply agile working methods and creativity techniques and learn new forms of collaboration.
Target Group
Our IdeenTriebwerk (Ideas Engine) offers decision-makers from manufacturing companies with responsibility for innovation, such as managing directors and product and innovation managers, a creative framework for developing and evaluating promising commercial approaches and solutions. HR developers who want to promote new training and continuing education formats for innovation-related topics will also find themselves at home at the IdeenTriebwerk. Students can also learn more about issues, trends and methods relating to product innovations in our courses and study-related projects.
Service offering
Since it opened its doors in the summer of 2019, we have been running workshops, training courses and information, networking and teaching events at the IdeenTriebwerk that are centered around the topic of »innovation«, and carrying out joint projects with partners from science and industry. Divided into the areas of ideation, creation, demonstration and pitching, we have created an inspiring working environment that is fully geared towards the development and work steps involved in each innovation process - from idea generation right through to business planning. We can assist you in your mission to turn your ideas into success stories by offering technology scouting, business analysis, idea sprints and lean and technical prototyping.
Insights into the IdeenTriebwerk
GEA-Makeathon
Service offering
GEA Germany is one of the largest system suppliers for the food processing industry. The company focuses on process technology and components for demanding production processes and manufactures separators, decanters, industrial centrifuges and much more. Before commissioning takes place at the customer’s site, GEA sets up the programmable logic controllers (PLCs) of the production plants for the respective process on site. Up to now, this has mainly been done manually using a graphical user interface of the plants. However, the process takes a lot of time and is also susceptible to errors.
The Fraunhofer Institute for Mechatronic Systems Design IEM assisted GEA with the further development of a prototypical administration tool that can be used to configure the control systems automatically. On the one hand, experts provided support with the conceptual design, technology selection and software development, as well as with the creation of a modern development infrastructure with continuous integration, which allows new program elements to be tested and merged immediately. On the other hand, GEA employees were taught advanced software engineering skills and trained to use the customer-centric, agile development method Scrum. This unique combination of content-related collaboration and needs-based training formats ensures that the software to be developed is of a high quality.
In addition, it ensures sustainable development of expertise and enables GEA employees to continuously refine and maintain the company’s own software products. The prototype of the administration tool was developed into a modern, web-based tool, which is used successfully in different areas of the company, e.g. in software development, on the test bench and even by customers themselves.