The beginnings of the AWARE network can be traced back to this first funding project: AWARE (Applied NetWork on Automotive Research and Education) was founded in 2013 as a strategic partnership of Technische Hochschule Ingolstadt (THI) with Universidade Federal do Paraná (UFPR), Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina (UFSC) and other partners from industry, society and politics. From the very beginning, the network pursued a structure-giving approach to realize exchange and transfer at all levels and in the cross-university sense.
Thanks to the support of the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) with more than 730,000 Euros, sustainable structures for the exchange of knowledge and practice with Brazil were established over a period of six years. These structures continue to live on today in the AWARE Center and are replicated with other Latin American countries. TH Ingolstadt was able to prevail against a multitude of competitors in the first call for proposals for this program: It was one of two universities of applied sciences selected for funding from 21 selected projects - and from a total of 117 applicant institutions.
