Germany, coordination
The Fraunhofer contract-research model
Germany funds the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft's institutes in proportion to what they earn from industry, and in 2025 the society performed 3.2 billion euros of contract research, 966 million euros of it paid by industry.
966,000,000 euros, industrial revenue, 2025. 3,200,000,000 euros, contract research volume, 2025. Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, facts and figures, retrieved 2026-08-27.
The move, and what it needed
The state pays each institute a base grant that grows with the industrial income it wins, so every institute director is structurally forced to sell applied research to firms while the public base keeps the science honest.
Preconditions
- An industrial base, especially the Mittelstand, that buys research it cannot do in-house
- A funding rule stable across decades, since the incentive works only if institutes believe it
- Careers competitive enough to keep researchers who could leave for industry
Where it travelled: Carnot in France and Catapult in the United Kingdom are explicit copies. Most copies struggle to replicate the base-grant-follows-industry-income rule, which is the part that does the work.
Limits: The figures are the society's own. Revenue measures demand for applied research, not whether knowledge moves between universities and firms, which is what the indicator asks about, and Fraunhofer sits beside the university system rather than inside it, so a reader can argue the model routes around university-industry collaboration as much as it evidences it. Roughly two-thirds of the budget is still public money.
This record describes what Germany delivered. It is linked to University-industry collaboration because no comparable dataset measures that capability. It does not affect the score or confidence.
More from Germany
1 other delivery from this country.
Kurzarbeit in the 2008-2009 crisis
Germany answered the 2008-2009 collapse in manufacturing orders by paying firms to cut hours instead of jobs, and short-time work covered 1.44 million workers at the May 2009 peak, about 5 percent of insured employment, while unemployment barely rose.