IMC's roots lie in the university environment, which is why they have excellent access to both know-how and experienced co-workers in the field. "IMC is making a contribution through its dedication to providing companies with sustainable, effective learning solutions to ensure that Germany remains an internationally competitive location", declared Dr. Volker Zimmermann, the IMC board member for new business. IMC is investing about one million euros of its own funds as part of the three currently running projects.

The PROWIT project


Combining business and learning processes is a central focus of the PROWIT project (process-oriented Web 2.0-based integrated telecommunications service), promoted by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research. Companies are increasing their use of Web 2.0 services such as wikis and blogs but seldom integrate them into their own business applications. Therefore, the potential of new telecommunications technologies for the planning, implementation, and execution of business processes is often not fully exploited.

The objective of PROWIT is to establish a new context-sensitive and ubiquitous service for business-process management. In this context, IMC is developing the Process Collaboration Platform, a knowledge community covering all aspects of business processes consisting of a number of individual services. The community integrates learning as well as the exchange of knowledge and information among co-workers with the business processes operating inside the company.

The European ROLE project

The ROLE project (Responsive Open Learning Environments) is part of the EU's 7th Framework Programme for research and was initiated in February 2009. The objective is to place learners in a position to put together their own personal learning environment (PLE). This PLE can consist of a number of different learning tools, learning services, and learning resources.

IMC has developed a number of learning widgets for this purpose, which can be subscribed to via the desktop or a mobile device. Many of these widgets combine the services of the CLIX learning management system and the SLIDESTAR content community. In the course of this development, new integration standards between the IMC web applications and web communities like OpenSocial have also been used.

The SABINE project is on its way

At the end of March 2009, the IMC SABINE project received sponsorship confirmation. The objective is to provide employees with offers that precisely match career choices they are likely to make at the various respective phases of their lives or - if no acceptable choices are available - for them to enter into further education or retraining. The IMC web technologies are being developed at the interface of job placement, recruiting, competence management, learning, and social networks as part of THESEUS, a funding programme initiated by the German Federal Ministry for Labour and Social Affairs.