15.05.2016 Open end
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SME-innovative: Sustainable Land Management

Knowledge carriers and developers of innovative methods for efficient land use are often small and medium sized enterprises (SME). Therefore, the BMBF supports SME as forerunners in sustainable land management.


To reduce the daily land consumption in Germany is one of the huge contemporary challenges. In the German sustainability strategy, the government pursues the objective to decrease the occupation of new areas for settlement and traffic from currently 70 hectare per day to 30 hectare per day in 2020. This also includes the enhancement of the inner urban development and compaction in urban spaces. A consequent circular land use management with a land recycling of idle fallow land is sought striven.

The field of „Sustainable land management" focuses on:

  • tools to reduce the occupation of new areas and enhancement of the inner urban development
  • Services, tools and technologies for land recycling

With the funding initiative „SME-Innovative", which started in 2007, the Federal Ministry of Education and Research aims to strengthen the innovation potential of small and medium sized enterprises in the top level research sector and thereby also their economic power permanently. Therefore, the BMBF has facilitated and accelerated the application and approval procedures and extended the advisory services for SMEs. A pilotage at the federal "research and Innovation" funding advisory service advises interested companies on all matters and sends them reliable to the correct service for application. Two regularly key dates, the 15th of April and the 15th of October, and the binding and short processing times allow planning security.

Addressed are innovative SMEs, which plan to establish in the sector of land management resp. plan to expand their position. The funding is open topic: More important than the exact thematic classification into a specific subject area are excellence and the degree of innovation of the funded project as well as high implementation chances.

In the funding catalogue you will find an overview about all projects.

Further information on the contact persons of the funding initiative SME innovative you will find on the BMBF-Website:
http://www.kmu-innovativ.de/

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