The European challenges for aerospace are: global leadership and attention for societal needs; world class capabilities and facilities in research, test and validation as well as in education; clusters and networks; technological basis for European products; European and national programmes in competition and cooperation. To achieve these goals it is necessary to jointly define European research and innovation strategies by all stakeholders and to implement them in a coordinated way covering the entire innovation chain from basic research via technology development up to demonstration. A network of multi-disciplinary technology clusters should be created based on collaboration between industry, universities and research institutes. The DLR and DLR@UNI can be seen as a prototype of a new generation of links for research.