Catalyst - A Digital Tool for Bridging the Scientific Gap across the Max Plank Institues

Catalyst is a proposed open-source, matchmaking-inspired mobile application designed to bridge the communication and collaboration gap among scientists across the 84 institutes of the Max Planck Society (MPG).

Innovative ideas rarely fail due to a lack of creativity; instead, they often stall at institutional and disciplinary boundaries. A lack of cross-institutional interfaces frequently prevents promising projects from being collaboratively developed and fast-tracking their journey from research to practical application. This is exactly where Catalyst comes in.

The Catalyst project addresses a core challenge in today's academic landscape: the traditionally limited cross-institutional and interdisciplinary networking among researchers. Utilizing an open, intuitive matching approach—inspired by modern platforms—Catalyst offers low-threshold, scalable access to new collaborations.