Report on the German System of Innovation

The report will describe the basic structures of the German System of Innovation in particular with regard to the role of scientific institutions. In addition to universities, the report will address the specific role of non-university research institutions, as their weight in Germany is considerable. The report will describe the specific challenges for the German system in view of the increasing international competition in technology. This first part will meet the requirements of point 1, mentioned in the introduction.

The second part of the German report will address in more detail the role of universities within the system, including figures on students, professors, budgets etc. A specific aspect is a description of the present process of reforming the German university sys-tem and the potential consequences for the role of the universities within the national system.
This report will be conceived as a position paper for the projected workshop in Cuba in February 2006 and revised on the basis of the discussion at that workshop. This report encompasses the points 2 and 3.1 of the introduction.

Report on the interaction of universities with the society

First, this report will address the links of universities to the productive sector (point 3.1.3 of the list above), which is generally discussed under the heading of ‘knowledge and technology transfer’ and primarily associated to technological issues. In this con-text, we will describe the broad literature, which already exists with regard to this topic including indicators on technology transfer and a description of the most relevant trans-fer mechanisms. This discussion will be made on the German macro level.

In addition, we intend to conduct a case study on the University of Bielefeld in the fed-eral state of Nordrhein-Westfalen. This university is a non-technical, classic university. It will be interesting to see which linkage mechanisms between a university and the society have been developed in such a situation. In particular, we expect to identify various mechanisms not related to technology transfer. For this purpose we intend to co-operate with the Institute for Science and Technology Studies (IWT) in Bielefeld which has already experiences with regard to this question.

In addition, we project to conduct a second case study at the University of Dortmund which is also located in Nordrhein-Westfalen, thus in a similar framework as Bielefeld. Dortmund is a technical university so that other linkage mechanisms will be relevant. In this case, the analysis will be less profound as in Bielefeld, but in any case, the main figure as to the volume and fields of technology transfer will be documented. Further-more we will look at institutions associated to the university, as according to recent studies, a major part of the technology transfer is not realised by direct university-industry contacts, but via these intermediate institutions which often do not appear in official statistics and may be labelled ‘grey transfer institutions’.

Final output

As final output of the project, we will prepare a synthesis report of about 20 pages con-ceived as a chapter to a book on the role of universities within National Systems of innovation. The first part of this synthesis report will be a short version of the report on the German innovation system, the second part will highlight the main findings as to the interaction of universities and society.