Copyright 2020, SIMUTENCE GmbH, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology.
After constructive contract negotiations over several rounds, KIT and SIMUTENCE GmbH have agreed to sign an individual software license agreement. Under this agreement, KIT grants SIMUTENCE GmbH, founded in April 2019, a non-exclusive right of use to further develop the SimFVK software developed at KIT, such that it can be used by SIMUTENCE for engineering services, as well as for licensed executables deployed to customers of SIMUTENCE.
SIMUTENCE was interested in SimFVK, a simulation software of KIT, due to its advanced methods for the virtual design of fiber-reinforced composites and hybrids. Employees of the department Lightweight Technology at the Institute of Vehicle System Technology (FAST) from KIT, to which the three founders of SIMUTENCE also belonged to, have programmed SimFVK in the context of their tasks as employees of KIT. The department Lightweight Technology headed by Prof. Dr.-Ing. Frank Henning is conducting research on simulation methods for fiber-reinforced composites and hybrids in the context of a virtual process chain.
In addition to the SIMUTENCE founders Dr. Dominik Dörr, Dr. Martin Hohberg and Dr. Benedikt Fengler, the head of the institute, Prof. Dr.-Ing. Frank Henning, the deputy director Dr. Luise Kärger, as well as Dr. Dirk Feuchter and Thomas Neumann of the Innovation and Relation Management (IRM) of KIT, are pleased about the signing of the license agreement, which once again succeeds in initiating the industrial exploitation of a scientific software and putting this on a legally sound contractual basis.
SIMUTENCE sees the signing of the license agreement as the foundation for further cooperation and plans for the future to cooperate with KIT and in particular with KIT-FAST on the basis of a cooperation agreement in order to jointly develop the methods from the perspectives of basic research and industrial application, respectively.