03.04 Science & Technology
Innovation: getting research out of the laboratory
Germany produces excellent research and too few companies that grow out of it — a diagnosis shared across party lines for decades. Since 2025 the instruments meant to close that gap, from the breakthrough agency SPRIND to new transfer programmes, sit in Dorothee Bär's ministry. This page explains what they are and what has changed.
01 — The problemGermany's innovation gap
Innovation policy is about what happens after research: how a discovery becomes a product, a process or a company. In Germany this second step has long been considered the weak link. The country ranks among the world's largest spenders on research and development, has dense networks of universities and research institutes, and a strong industrial base in cars, chemicals and machinery. Yet few of its young technology companies have grown into global players, and many promising technologies have been commercialised elsewhere.
Analysis Explanations differ. Some point to a shortage of late-stage venture capital, which forces fast-growing companies to raise money abroad. Others cite cautious public procurement, complex funding rules, slow administrative procedures, and an academic career system that rewards publications more than start-ups. Most of these levers lie with several ministries at once, which is why “transfer” has been reorganised repeatedly.
The organisational decree of 6 May 2025 moved core questions of innovation and technology policy, together with SPRIND and the High-Tech Agenda, from the economics ministry to the BMFTR. For the first time in many years, the federal government's research funder also owns the main instruments of innovation policy. That concentration is the starting point for everything below.
Research base
Four large research organisations, strong universities, and R&D spending of 3.17% of GDP.
Scale-up
Too few start-ups grow large; growth capital and first customers are often found abroad.
One owner
Since 2025, research, technology policy and SPRIND sit in one ministry.
02 — Breakthrough funding
SPRIND: the agency for leaps
A federal agency built to take risks
SPRIND, the Federal Agency for Disruptive Innovation, was founded in 2019 and is based in Leipzig. It funds radical, high-risk ideas — “leap innovations” — that ordinary programmes would reject as too uncertain.
Legal basis
Verified fact The SPRIND Freedom Act (SPRIND-Freiheitsgesetz) of 22 December 2023, passed under the previous government, gave the agency more freedom in how it funds and finances projects. An evaluation was due by 31 January 2026.
Ministerial home
Verified fact Under the organisational decree of 6 May 2025, responsibility for SPRIND moved to the BMFTR. Bär's ministry is now its supervising department.
How it works
Rather than funding proposals through classical peer review, SPRIND scouts ideas, runs open challenges in which teams compete, and can found subsidiaries to develop a technology. The model is often compared with the US agency DARPA.
Open questions
Analysis A breakthrough agency succeeds only if it is allowed to fail. How the ministry uses the evaluation, and whether SPRIND keeps its independence inside a ministry that also runs a detailed technology strategy, will show how much freedom the 2023 law really grants.
03 — Transfer, step by step
From DATI to new instruments
The previous government planned a German Agency for Transfer and Innovation (DATI), with a seat in Erfurt. The current coalition took a different route. The chronology below shows the main steps; items based on single sources are marked as such.
- 2023Previous government
SPRIND Freedom Act
Adopted 22 December 2023, giving the breakthrough agency more financial and legal flexibility.
- 20256 May
Innovation policy moves to the BMFTR
Core questions of innovation and technology policy, the High-Tech Agenda and SPRIND transfer from the economics ministry to Bär's new ministry.
- 2025Coalition agreement
DATI not continued
According to a Bundestag printed paper (Drucksache 21/4016), the planned DATI is not being continued; the coalition agreement instead foresees an umbrella brand, “Initiative Forschung & Anwendung” (Research & Application Initiative). Its exact shape had not been fully documented in the sources reviewed for this page.
- 202530 July
High-Tech Agenda
The cabinet adopts the agenda, which links key-technology research to value creation in Germany.
- 202620 May
Roadmaps with transfer tools
The first-version technology roadmaps propose €115m over five years for four “Hightech-Spaces” and a €100m “KI-Robotik-Booster” for AI-driven robotics.
- 20265 September
Isar Aerospace reaches orbit
A German deep-tech start-up becomes the first commercial provider to reach orbit from continental Europe.
What are Hightech-Spaces?
The first-version roadmaps name four “Hightech-Spaces” with €115m over five years. Their purpose, criteria, locations and selection procedures were not set out in detail in the sources reviewed here, so this page reports only the planned volume and does not speculate about their design.
04 — New fields in the portfolio
Games and air mobility
Two smaller items in the organisational decree of May 2025 say something about how broadly the government now defines innovation. Both connect to themes Bär has pursued for years.
Games
Verified fact Responsibility for games moved from the economics ministry to the BMFTR. Computer and video games are a creative industry, but also a technology sector: game engines, real-time graphics and simulation are used in film, industry, medicine and training. Bär has long been associated with the German Computer Game Award and with the political recognition of e-sports.
On 10 September 2025 the cabinet approved charitable (gemeinnützig) status for e-sports as part of the Tax Amendment Act 2025 (Steueränderungsgesetz 2025), a change long sought by the e-sports scene. Tax law is the finance ministry's business; her role here was that of a long-standing advocate.
„Meilenstein für Gaming, Jugendförderung und Vereinsarbeit“
“A milestone for gaming, youth development and club work.”
Air mobility
Verified fact From the transport ministry, the BMFTR took over funding for U-space — the framework for managing drone traffic in low airspace — and for Advanced Air Mobility, which includes electric air taxis and drones for transport.
Analysis The topic has a history. In March 2018, as incoming Commissioner for Digitalisation, Bär was widely mocked for mentioning flying taxis in a television interview about slow broadband. Seven years later her ministry is responsible for funding exactly this field. Whether air taxis become a market remains uncertain — several European developers have struggled financially — but the episode illustrates how yesterday's ridicule can become today's funding line. The background is on the digitalisation page and under culture and media for games.
Why it matters for innovation policy
Both fields depend on regulation as much as on research money: e-sports on tax and association law, air mobility on airspace rules and certification. They show the limits of what a research ministry can do on its own.
05 — A deep-tech example
Isar Aerospace: a start-up reaches orbit
Deep-tech start-ups — companies built on hard science and engineering rather than software alone — need years of development and large sums before they earn revenue. Isar Aerospace, a Bavarian launch-vehicle company, is the most visible German example of the past year.
Verified fact The first flight of its Spectrum rocket in March 2025 failed. On 5 September 2026 the second flight reached orbit from the Andøya spaceport in Norway, carrying six payloads. It was the first time a commercial provider reached orbit from continental Europe. According to reporting, payloads came from a German Space Agency competition for universities and start-ups.
Analysis The case shows how innovation policy works in practice. Start-ups like this are financed mainly by private investors, but public institutions matter as customers and enablers: competition between launch providers, which Germany named as a priority at the ESA Ministerial Council in November 2025, and national programmes that give young companies their first missions. The success belongs to the company; the policy question is how to make such successes less exceptional. See space policy.
Schematic, not to scale.
06 — Competitiveness
Where Germany stands
Research spending is an input, not an outcome. But it is the figure governments set targets for, and the one on which Germany has recently fallen short.
Record R&D spending in Germany in 2024, public and private
Source: BuFI 2026 via Forschung & LehreR&D intensity: spending as a share of GDP, 2024
Source: BuFI 2026 via Forschung & LehreTarget moved from 2025 to 2030 after it was missed
Source: Forschung & Lehre, 9 June 2026KI-Robotik-Booster proposed in the AI roadmap draft
Source: Forschung & LehreScientific entrepreneurship
An increasingly important strand of innovation policy concerns researchers themselves: whether professors, postdocs and doctoral students can found companies without risking their academic careers, how universities handle intellectual property, and whether spin-offs can use institute laboratories in their early years.
Analysis Research organisations such as Fraunhofer and many universities run their own spin-off and founder programmes. The federal role is mostly indirect: funding conditions, programmes and the example set by its own agencies. The new BMFTR structure gives the minister more influence over these conditions than her predecessors at the old education and research ministry had.
Supporters argue
Bringing SPRIND, technology policy and research together ends the fragmentation that slowed transfer. Abandoning DATI avoided building a new bureaucracy.
Critics argue
Dropping DATI leaves open how transfer from universities of applied sciences, for which the agency had been designed, will be supported. In the 2026 budget debate, the Left's Sonja Lemke criticised spending blocks on transfer programmes.
For the strategy behind these tools, see the High-Tech Agenda; for the research base, research policy; for the money, science and research funding.