In October 2006, Universität Karlsruhe succeeded in the first line of the Excellence Competition launched by the Federal Republic of Germany and the German states in all three lines of funding: a graduate school (Karlsruhe School of Optics and Photonics – KSOP), an excellence cluster (Center for Functional Nanostructures – CFN) and a concept for the future (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology – KIT). As a result, the university was granted the elite status as one of three universities in Germany. This success was largely based on the proposed future concept. The central element of the future concept was the foundation of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) together with the Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe.
After Forschungszentrum and Universität Karlsruhe signed the foundation agreement in December 2007 and, thereby created the legal prerequisites for the first step of a far-reaching cooperation in KIT, the Federal Republic of Germany and the state of Baden-Württemberg in February 2008 gave green light for a merger of both institutions into a public corporation according to Baden-Württemberg law. The legal framework of the merger was recorded in the KIT Merger Act.
KIT is an institution with two missions - that of a university of the state of Baden-Württemberg with research and teaching tasks and that of a large-scale research centre within the Helmholtz Association conducting programme-oriented provident research. And it has got three tasks: research, teaching and innovation.
