Who we are

Collaborations with academia

Our global network with excellent universities, research institutes and companies is an important part of our Know-How Verbund. We collaborate with eight Academic Research Alliances und around 250 universities and research institutes to achieve our growth targets.

Diverse teams produce creative ideas and innnovative solutions - as a research-driven company, BASF knows the value of this.

In our collaborations we offer scientists from universities and research institutes the opportunity to participate in close-to-practice research projects and thereby to create added value for our society by developing innovative solutions. Therefore, we maintain close relations with many universities and research institutes around the world. We collaborate with many individual research groups all over the world. Collaboration is all about bringing the right people together to work on challenging and meaningful problems. BASF is  highly interested to invest in such relationships to grow together with its partners.

With our Academic Research Alliances, we take collaboration one step further: Our Academic Research Alliances focus on research groups from multiple universities in regional proximity or with specific research focuses and thus form a global network of our world class academic partners. Our eight Academic Research Alliances are complemented by collaborations with around 250 universities and research institutes as well as collaborations with a large number of companies. 

Our eight Academic Research Alliances: 

Closely connected through an Academic Partnership Developer

A dedicated scientist from BASF, the so called Academic Partnership Developer (APD) is assigned to the Academic Research Alliance. An APD resides on site. It is their job to connect the Academic Research Alliance with BASF, and to represent BASF at the Academic Research Alliance. The APD is actively looking for new technologies of interest to BASF, and identifies opportunities and initializes new collaboration projects. In some cases a framework agreement between BASF and the Academic Research Alliance enables a fast start of new projects. In other cases, the APD will facilitate the contract between the legal departments of the Academic Research Alliance and BASF.