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.
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.
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.
🇰🇪Kenyasince 2007still operatingbears on Public-private collaboration
Kenya's central bank let a phone company build a national payments system in 2007 and supervised it into ubiquity, and by June 2026 Kenya had 94.2 million registered mobile money accounts and 572,104 agents, in a population of about 55 million.
The central bank issued a letter of no objection instead of demanding a banking licence, set conditions on trust accounts holding customer float, and wrote the e-money regulations after the system worked, legalising what it had learned rather than licensing what it could imagine.
Preconditions
A regulator senior enough to carry the risk of saying yes
A mobile operator with national agent reach and its own fraud controls
A banking sector too small in reach to block the entrant
Where it travelled: Mobile money spread across Africa and South Asia, but mostly where regulators copied the permissive sequencing. Where banking law was applied first, including in some of Kenya's neighbours for years, adoption stalled.
Limits: The delivery was Safaricom's, a majority-private company, so the record bears on public-private collaboration only through what the state did: permit, then supervise, then regulate interoperability. Registered accounts overstate people, since many Kenyans hold several, and account counts say nothing about fees, which are materially higher than card rails elsewhere. A single dominant operator is also a concentration the indicator's construct does not reward.
🇨ðŸ‡Switzerlandsince 2004still operatingbears on Public-private collaboration
Switzerland runs most upper-secondary education through firms: of 218,259 students enrolled in vocational education and training in 2020, 90.6 percent, 197,782, were apprentices trained inside companies under federal law.
Federal law makes firms, cantons and professional associations joint owners of training: associations write the curricula for their own occupations, firms hire and pay apprentices to do real work, and the state examines and certifies, so the labour market signals what to teach.
Preconditions
Employer associations strong enough to write and update curricula
Apprentice wages low enough that training pays for the firm
Social standing for the vocational route, so strong students choose it
Where it travelled: Germany and Austria run sibling systems; exports to countries without employer associations mostly produce school-based programmes with the dual name, which drops the part that works.
Limits: Enrolment counts participation in the system, not what the training is worth; the wage and employment evidence sits in separate studies. The system long predates the number: 2004 is the current federal act, not the start of apprenticeship in Switzerland, and the record cannot show how much of the outcome is the law versus a century of employer habit. Firms train because it pays them net of apprentice output, and that arithmetic, not the statute, is the load-bearing part.
🇧🇷Brazilsince 1974still operatingbears on Public-private collaboration
Brazil and Paraguay built and operate Itaipu through a treaty-based binational entity, which reached 14,000 megawatts of installed capacity and has supplied both countries since the first unit entered operation in 1984.
Brazil and Paraguay converted a contested shared river into a jointly governed operating institution with its own legal personality, fixed allocation rules and a long-lived technical system.
Preconditions
A legal agreement that specifies rights, obligations and decision authority
A physical project large enough to create mutual dependence
Technical and financial institutions able to keep the partnership operating for decades
Limits: Installed capacity shows the scale of the physical system, not the quality of the bilateral relationship, the project's cost or the distribution of its benefits. A treaty structure can hold a joint asset together while leaving wider coordination between the countries unresolved.