At the Demo Day, the Innovation Campus for Sustainable Solutions (InCamS@BI) team and 60 guests will look back on the first year of the project. A keynote speech by Advisory Board member Thomas Henningsen and an improv theater show by the "Stereotypes" accompanied the presentation of the project in a critical and humorous way.

Prof. Dr. Anant Patel can't really be upset by much. Conference presentations, lectures or seminars - speaking in front of an audience at is all in a day's work for the Professor of Process Engineering and Vice President for Research and Development at Bielefeld University of Applied Sciences (HSBI). But becoming part of an improv theater show for one evening, in which the plot jumps between interviews and acted scenes, sketches and songs , is a completely new experience for the member of the HSBI Executive Board: "Beforehand, I thought about whether I could contribute anything suitable to a theater show at all. But in InCamS@BI we want to try out new transfer formats, so I took the plunge," says Patel about the path to his stage premiere.



Impro meets InCamS@BI: knowledge transfer with an entertainment factor Initiating knowledge transfer with the aim of a circular economy of plastics through different formats and between the partners society, industry and science - this is what the joint transfer project of HSBI and Bielefeld University has set out to do and is also implementing this requirement at the first project show, the Demo Day. The team has enlisted the support of the Bielefeld improv theater duo "Die Stereotypen". Under this name, Marvin Meinold and his partner Nele Kießling, who will be excellently represented by Ben Hartwig on this evening, have been mixing the genres of moderation, interview and improvisational theater together with their musician Jannis Kaffka since 2008. In their program "Brainstorm", developed in cooperation with the Wissenswerkstadt Bielefeld, they bring guests from the world of science on stage to present their complex topics in an entertaining and understandable way. Consequently, the Demo Day evening will focus on the topics of transfer and circular value creation.



Greetings from the President and project presentation by the sub-project leaders



But first it's the hosts' turn. The President of HSBI will kick things off with a welcome address. Prof. Dr. Ingeborg Schramm-Wölk emphasizes that the project goals are in line with the strategic goals of the university as a whole: "With InCamS@BI, we have launched a project this year that, with sustainability, takes up one of the guiding themes of the Executive Board and can tie in with our diverse innovation networks in OWL ."



After a brief welcome from project manager Dr. Melanie Wilde, who will also lead through the evening with interim moderations, Prof. Dr. Sonja Schöning and Prof. Dr. Christian Schröder will then give a brief presentation of InCamS@BI. In it, the two sub-project leaders repeatedly emphasize the goal of the interdisciplinary team: successful transfer with subsequent exploitation: "With InCamS@BI, we want to release the transfer handbrake that is currently still sometimes holding us back in the implementation of our research results. This could be scientific publications, new applications, but above all joint developments together with companies," Christian Schröder sums up.



Keynote speech by former Greenpeace campaign manager Thomas Henningsen: "We can still be part of the solution!"



In his subsequent guest lecture, Advisory Board member Dr. Thomas Henningsen drew a direct line between the project goal of a circular economy for plastics and the dramatic developments of climate change and the crisis of all ecological systems: global warming, associated extreme weather events and the amount of marine plastic have reached catastrophic proportions worldwide. However, despite the depressing indicators, resignation is not an alternative in the face of the major challenge: "We can still be part of the solution if we take immediate and decisive countermeasures," Henningsen gave a hopeful outlook at the end of his keynote speech. In addition to renewable energies and the designation of new protected areas, a key to getting a grip on global resource consumption lies above all in the circular economy: "I hope that this project can contribute to finding a solution."





"The stereotypes" take on the project topics: "9 billion tons of love, since I know you work in InCamS@BI"



First, however, the mood in the university's conference hall lightens. Because as the highlight and conclusion of the first Demo Day, "Die Stereotypen" Marvin Meinold and Ben Hartwig take to the stage. In their 70-minute improv show, they repeatedly pick up on set pieces from the previous lectures, satirize, interpret scenically, contextualize anew and thus form humorous summaries of the entire evening. At the heart of their show are two interviews in which the main themes of the project are presented in an entertaining way: In the first interview with Marvin Meinold, technology scout Heike Wulf explains the difficulties companies face when implementing circular value creation and how InCamS@BI aims to help with this. In the broadest sense, this is about partner work. This is the keyword for Ben Hartwig, who asks his partner Meinold to re-enact such an InCamS@BI-meets-transfer-partner situation. The topic of the scene is set to 'love' by a call from the audience and so a witty dialog develops, at the end of which Hartwig confesses to his partner Meinold with a tongue-in-cheek reference to figures from the Henningsen lecture on the ratio of living mass to the total amount of plastics that he feels "9 billion tons of love" for him "and it's getting more every day since I know that you work in InCamS@BI". Finally, the interview pair changes and Anant Patel and Ben Hartwig talk just as entertainingly about the importance of transfer and the pioneering role that InCamS@BI plays in the development of new, simplified transfer structures. At the end of an entertaining first Demo Day, the Vice President for Research and Development certainly has no regrets about his stage premiere: "I laughed tears at times and at the same time haven't had such an interesting conversation about the topic of transfer for a long time. Demo Day has a lot of potential to combine entertainment, knowledge transfer and networking in a new transfer format."