administration are the implementation of a campus management system as well as the renovation and improvement of campus infrastructure. Research HHU's motto, "Life.Nature.Society", suggests its core competencies in research and teaching. Effective cooperation with university and non-university partners led to a rise in third-party funding from 49 million Euros in 2008 to 67 million Euros in 2011. Projects of the Medical Faculty account for circa 35 million Euros of this competitive budget. Renowned research collaborations and high-class individual projects made various national and international successes possible: National In 2012 HHU and its partner institutions – the University of Cologne, the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research and Forschungszentrum Jülich – received the grant for the Cluster of Excellence CEPLAS in the Excellence Initiative of the German Federal and State Governments. CEPLAS will investigate solutions for a resource-efficient plant growth against the backdrop of a growing world population on the one hand and dwindling natural resources on the other. International HHU is currently involved in 23 international projects funded within the EU's Seventh Framework Programme. 11 further international projects have just ended. Two HHU researchers at the Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences have thus far attained the highest award at European Level, the ERC Advanced Grant. A culture of entrepreneurship HHU promotes research- and knowledge-based start-ups. Its concept to strengthen an entrepreneurial culture at and around HHU was successful in the EXIST competition of the Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology (Germany). The Centre for Entrepreneurship Düsseldorf (CEDUS) functions as HHU's local one-stop shop for all queries related to self-employment and starting one's own company. Available support includes coaching, the acquisition of grants, professional training and further education. The transfer agency DIWA GmbH is responsible for any coordinated activity in this field. Teaching Teaching enjoys top priority at HHU. In recent years, the university has undertaken substantial efforts to improve study conditions and the quality of teaching through various projects: HHU successfully competed in the Quality Pact for Teaching of the Federal Government and the Länder. This resulted in a nine-million-Euro grant for the university's integrated quality improvement scheme "iQu" over the coming five years. Cornerstones of this project are increased students' success rates at high levels of academic quality, designing a systematic training concept for all teaching staff, and reinforcing the e-learning and e-teaching concepts already established during the HeinEComp project. To support new students during their first