The WWU, under the leadership of Professor Manfred Krafft, has been awarded funding for partnerships in higher education through the "Erasmus+" program. Despite first experiences with Erasmus+ at the University of Münster, this is a particularly pleasing result, as only a few funding applications in the co-application procedure have been approved so far for the WWU. The project duration is 3 years.

The application was submitted on the joint initiative of Professor Schiele (University of Twente) and Manfred Krafft (University of Münster). Three other universities are also involved in the project, recruited primarily from the network of the Chair of Marketing Management. The cooperation partners are Graz University of Technology, Alba Graduate Business School in Athens and Kozminski University in Warsaw (the latter is a long-standing cooperation partner of WWU). The overarching goal of the project is to develop an empirically validated competency model for B2B sales and customer management as well as a curriculum and program guide for developing these skills against the backdrop of the ever-increasing digitalization of the B2B environment. In addition, a curriculum is to be offered as a designated master's degree program in order to strengthen cooperation between the five participating universities.

Planned project deliverables include an overview of the current state of research in B2B sales, selling and digital marketing skills in industrial markets. Also planned is a prototype open online course (to be accessible to European learners as a MOOC) and a collection of corporate best practices, e.g. training methods and content (mentoring, lunch and learns, etc.).

The cooperation between the participating universities consists of individual work packages of the project, each of which is assigned to one of the cooperation partners. In addition, regular face-to-face meetings at changing locations are planned on an annual basis. The first meeting of the ten project participants will take place in Münster from May 18 to 20, 2022, to kick off the first phase of the project.