Excellence Initiative

2nd Phase (2012-2017)

Agreement of the Federal Government and the states to continue the Excellence Initiative and Call for proposals (2nd phase):

Preselection - 2 March 2011:

1st Phase (2006-2012)

Agreement of the Federal Government and the states to set up the Excellence Initiative and Call for proposals (1st phase):

First round - Preselection - 20 January 2006:

First round - Funding decisions - 13 October 2006:

Second round - Preselection - 12 January 2007:

Second round - Funding decisions - 19 October 2007:

Analysis of the 1st Programme Phase

In the 2006 and 2007 rounds the funding was distributed as follows:
_ 37 universities were funded through at least one of the three lines of funding.
_ 9 universities were funded through all three lines of funding. These universities received 58 % of the total funding capital.
_ Almost a third of the projects selected for the first and second lines of funding were projects in the life sciences (biology and medicine), the rest of the projects were approximately equally divided between humanities/social sciences, natural sciences/mathematics and engineering/informatics.

In November 2008 the German Council for Science and Humanities and the German Science Foundation submitted a report on the Excellence Initiative to the Joint Science Conference of the Federal Government and the state governments. The report includes a comprehensive analysis of the Excellence Initiative and proposes recommendations for the continuation of the programme.

Staff recruitment under the Excellence Initiative (State of affairs: February 2009)

Staff recruitment under the Excellence Initiative (Article by the iFQ, Institute for Research Information and Quality Assurance, German text only)

Dynamic development (Article by the iFQ, German text only)

Distribution of funding by lines of funding, universities, states and subject groups

An analysis of the Excellence Initiative was published by the former Chairman of the German Council of Science and Humanities, Professor Dr. Peter Strohschneider, under the title
Conditions for the excellent science (in: Excellence Initiative - The Winners. Institutional Strategies, Graduate Schools, Clusters of Excellence, Bonn 2009) and in his speech
On the preconditions and concept of the excellence initiative (German text only) (Opening of the University Day in Tutzing on 1 February 2008).