TU Dresden (TUD) has chosen its own path with its application in the excellence initiative. The university submitted an application package on 01 September 2011 that aims to strengthen the university as a whole with its academic diversity and to further promote synergies among the scientific disciplines.

The application package comprises the proposals for the institutional strategy, the excellence cluster (Center for Advancing Electronics Dresden, cfaed) and the renewal applications for its existent excellence activities such as the excellence cluster "From Cells to Tissues to Therapies" (CRTD) and the Dresden International Graduate School for Biomedicine and Bioengineering (DIGS-BB). 

TUD’s institutional strategy links several special measures for further improving the framework conditions for top research and excellent teaching. These measures comprise:

• strengthening interdisciplinary and crossdisciplinary scientific work
• optimizing the structures and processes within the university as well as in interplay with partners outside the university
• the DRESDEN-concept
• innovative ways to attract the best brains to TU Dresden and to keep them there.

The DRESDEN concept is a core element of TUD’s application in the context of the excellence initiatives. TUD’s unique scientific network, which has been active since early 2009, has an additional 14 partners from four of Germany’s major institutional research facilities, the Fraunhofer Society, the Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres, which the Dresden-Rossendorf Research Centre has been joining in 2011, the Max Planck Society and the Leibniz institutes as well as renowned museums and libraries located in Dresden. In August 2010, it also acquired a legal personality as a registered association with official name "DRESDEN-concept e.V.".

The excellence cluster has been worked out by researchers from scientific fields in which TU Dresden already excels and in which the institutions in Dresden outside the university are likewise strong.

There are, as just mentioned, two renewal applications in the TUD research area of biomedicine/bioengineering, submitted by Prof. Michael Brand, Prof. Wieland Huttner, and Prof. Gerhard Rödel. In the TUD research area of information technology/microelectronics, Prof. Gerhard Fettweis has coordinated a draft proposal that deals with the midterm critical questions of computer aided computation.