44 deliveries, 19 countries

What countries built

Each record describes something a country built that the indicators miss. The source provides the number; the mechanism is our interpretation.

Scores describe outcomes. These records describe how a country acted, what it needed and what happened. 44 of 44 records include a mechanism. They do not affect scores.

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SearchCountryDimensionStatusWith a mechanism2 of 44

Coordination

1 delivery linked to University-industry collaboration.

Germanysince 1973still operatingbears on University-industry collaboration

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.

Adaptability

1 delivery linked to Institutional responsiveness.

Germanysince 2008delivered and closedbears on Institutional responsiveness

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.

1,440,000 workers, workers in cyclical short-time work at the peak, 2009-05. IAB, the research institute of the Bundesagentur fuer Arbeit, IAB-Kurzbericht 17/2020, citing Statistik der BA, retrieved 2026-08-27.

The move, and what it needed

The employment agency reimburses firms most of the net wage for hours not worked when demand collapses, converting the existing unemployment-insurance fund into a payroll bridge, and the 2009 government lengthened the entitlement and cut the paperwork.

Preconditions

A standing legal instrument and fund, so scaling needed a regulation rather than a new law
Works councils and employers used to negotiating hours
A shock read as temporary, since the bridge only pays off if demand returns

Where it travelled: Short-time work schemes spread across the OECD after 2009 and nearly everywhere in 2020. The lesson that travelled worst is fiscal: the bridge is cheap only when the crisis is short.

Limits: The count says how many workers were covered, not what the scheme cost, how much of the covered work would have survived anyway, or whether it slowed reallocation to better firms, which are the standard criticisms. The instrument long predates 2008; what the episode evidences is the speed at which an existing legal instrument was expanded inside one year. The same instrument covered over six million people in 2020, so the 2009 number is not its ceiling.