Thanks for sharing Miriam Partington, happy that the problem is well understood by all parties involved, and least some of them are doing something about it.
Same story applies to Spain, sadly with a lot less support by local, regional and national leaders.
Happy, that we are contributing to changing the future of DeepTech in TRL+
Rethinking tech transfer in Germany
Founders, investors and policymakers in Germany have all told me recently that they’re grappling with one big challenge: how to create more companies from academic research.
Germany tops the European Patent Office’s annual index for the most applications filed in each of the last three years. Yet, data shows it’s not as good at commercialising those inventions.
The country spends the same on R&D as a percentage of GDP and publishes nearly the same number of scientific publications per 1,000 people as the US, according to a 2021 report by Lakestar VC. Some of its better known tech companies like process mining unicorn Celonis, rocketmaker Isar Aerospace and mobility giant Flix have roots in German universities — but at the growth stage per capita investment is a tenth of America’s.
It’s something governments across Europe are thinking about a lot. Universities are seen as the place where we’re going to find the next big companies in areas like quantum, AI and energy. But there are many things holding them back.
One is actually getting more academics to start businesses, says Helmut Schönenberger, cofounder and CEO of UnternehmerTUM, the startup lab of The Technical University of Munich (TUM) founded in 2002.
Schönenberger says entrepreneurship at universities is widely seen as less of a priority than education and research; it’s often described as the “third mission”. To change this, entrepreneurship classes, seminars and guest lectures need to be offered early in a student’s education, not after they’ve done their PhD, when commercialising research typically happens, adds Bastian Halecker, a deeptech entrepreneurship professor at XU Exponential University of Applied Sciences in Potsdam.
The appetite to found companies is there. Halecker’s research shows that 28% of scientists in Germany want to create spinouts, but only 3% do. That could all change if universities allocated more resources to entrepreneurship, another bottleneck. “I know a few universities in Germany, big ones, without any entrepreneurial professorship. There’s nobody in charge of that stuff,” he says.
Schönenberger says universities need to build dedicated startup labs and “professionalise the entrepreneurial process” to guide students to found businesses. TUM, for example, dedicates 3-4% of its annual budget to entrepreneurship, he says.
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