Framework for Innovation

Accomplishing the transition: the Future Council of the Federal Chancellor

In the Future Council of the Federal Chancellor, high-level representatives of science and industry discussed new developments, discoveries and trends in the innovation cycle. In 2024, they continued to formulate proposals for maximising the potential of research and enterprise, with the aim of strengthening Germany’s resilience and technological sovereignty. The discussions also encompassed public acceptance and ethical questions.

The Future Council was coordinated by a project office at acatech which provided background documentation on the different agenda topics, ensuring a common factual and discussion basis for the advice provided to the Federal Government.

In 2024, the Council’s discussions centred on the application and development of generative artificial intelligence (AI) and on strengthening the innovation system in Germany.

The agenda for the fourth meeting of the Future Council on 26 January 2024 focused on generative AI. The Council’s members discussed this technology’s potential for science, industry and the public administration. It was unanimously agreed that Germany must rapidly and securely deploy generative AI throughout industry while at the same time having a say in the technology’s development. Following on from this, the Future Council discussed how Germany can systematically drive generative AI’s development and application. The discussion gave rise to concrete recommendations, in particular concerning the establishment and expansion of computational capacity for domestic businesses and research institutions in Germany. This is key to ending unilateral dependencies and embedding European values in AI models.

At its meeting on 28 August 2024*, the Future Council discussed how to strengthen innovation in Germany in these changing times. In view of the current security policy and financial challenges, the members of the Future Council stressed the need to update Germany’s innovation system in order to enable more efficient translation of world-class research into marketable innovations. A key requirement is to create and strengthen innovation ecosystem networks where universities, businesses and start-ups work together closely. In addition, innovation processes should be accelerated by reducing the regulatory burden and through targeted investment, licensing procedures should be simplified, and more living labs should be established. The Future Council also discussed the need to increase digitalisation of the public administration. Other proposals included the expansion of existing growth finance funding instruments and facilitating access to venture capital for small and medium-sized enterprises and start-ups.

The acatech IMPULSES Souveräne Antworten – Anwendung und Entwicklung generativer Künstlicher Intelligenz in Deutschland* and Innovationsfähigkeit in der Zeitenwende* summarise the dossiers prepared by the acatech project office. Both documents demonstrate the importance of a cross-cutting, interdepartmental innovation policy that can be flexibly adapted to new geopolitical and technological challenges.

One issue that received a lot of attention at the Future Council was support for task forces to initiate implementation of the key consultation outputs. The Future Council’s discussions set important measures in motion, especially in relation to AI-powered robotics and the development of sovereign cloud and AI infrastructures. Summer 2024 saw the launch of the Robotics Institute Germany (RIG) AI-powered robotics hub and the RoX consortium, both of which comprise prominent partners from science and industry. The consortium aims to develop a digital ecosystem for AI-powered robotics with scalable, innovative transfer solutions. In January 2025*, a task force coordinated by acatech and comprising businesses, research institutions and policymakers presented a sovereign cloud and AI infrastructure strategy for Germany.

Germany’s Innovation System: second study focuses on the public administration

You can’t have sustainable prosperity without innovation. But the extent to which new ideas are successfully developed, implemented and made available to the public through appropriate business models depends on multiple factors and on the behaviour of many different actors. Since 2022, acatech’s Germany’s Innovation System project has been investigating how to improve the conditions for innovation. The project’s first STUDY on securing Germany’s skills base was followed up in 2024 with a publication devoted to the public administration*. The STUDY answers questions such as how to make administrative processes more efficient and agile, and where targeted measures are needed to make entrenched administrative structures more flexible.

A project team led by acatech Executive Board members Christoph M. Schmidt and Ann-Kristin Achleitner investigated three subdomains: employees, structures and technologies. It identified increasing the use of digital technology and reducing the regulatory burden as key challenges. The number of individual regulations in Federal Government laws and ordinances has risen by 17 percent in the last ten years alone. Cultural factors are another challenge – just 23 percent of Germany’s 11,000 municipalities currently evaluate their digitalisation level.

In order to successfully manage this regulatory burden, the public administration needs to remove the relevant barriers and strengthen interdepartmental bodies. This will call for seamless lines of communication, a harmonised IT structure and data basis, and fully digitalised administrative processes.

Christoph M. Schmidt, project leader and acatech Executive Board member

The authors also recommend strengthening the decision-making powers and ability to make policy interventions of centralised bodies like the IT Planning Council. This will help to ensure that digitalisation processes in the public administration are coordinated and managed more effectively across the whole of Germany. It is also vital to ensure that the public administration has the right staff to perform the relevant tasks. The percentage of lawyers at management level is significantly higher in Germany than in other countries’ public administrations. But there are risks to focusing too narrowly on legal qualifications when recruiting public administration managers, not least the danger of overlooking the skills needed to enable greater administrative agility.

In addition, too many municipalities are still trying to make do without the skills of a Chief Digital Officer – a survey found that just 35 percent of German municipalities have a CDO.

Innovation happens when novel ideas are coupled with a willingness to change, and the transformation of the public administration is no exception. In order to modernise, it must be open to agile, efficient solutions and cross-hierarchical, interdepartmental ways of working, and must focus on actively looking for solutions rather than trying to avoid mistakes.

Christoph M. Schmidt, project leader and acatech Executive Board member

Due to be published in autumn 2025, the Germany’s Innovation System project’s third STUDY will explore the potential of closer coordination between the civilian and military innovation ecosystems.

STEM Proficiency Study gives students a disappointing end-of-year report

The 2024 edition of the STEM Proficiency Study published by acatech and the Joachim Herz Foundation once again provided an overview of the main research findings in the field of STEM education (science, technology, engineering and mathematics). Students in Germany are performing disappointingly in the STEM subjects compared to other countries around the world. The trend for mathematics is particularly worrying: according to the 2024 study*, performance in mathematics among 15-year-olds declined by 39 percent between 2012 and 2022, equivalent to falling behind by a whole school year. Over the same period, the proportion of worst-performing students rose from around 17 percent in 2012 to approximately 29 percent in 2022. The percentage of top-performing students halved during this time, falling to just nine percent in 2022.

The STEM Proficiency Study paints a more positive picture for apprenticeships and universities. STEM apprenticeships are becoming more popular (162,000 new contracts in 2022, 173,500 in 2023), while around 10,000 more university students graduated in a STEM subject in 2022 than in 2020. However, the number of university dropouts remains high. In fact, the 50.5 percent dropout rate in 2022 was slightly higher than the previous year (49.2 percent). The study suggests that artificial intelligence could help to tackle this problem. Universities are now using process data and machine learning techniques to generate study progress forecasts. These can help to ensure that students at risk of dropping out receive the appropriate support before it is too late.

Study lead Olaf Köller and acatech President Jan Wörner presented and discussed the study’s findings at a high-level dialogue in Berlin on 16 May 2024. The participants in the discussion all agreed that structural changes are urgently needed in the education system to prevent the problems in STEM education from getting even worse in the next decade.

We must do more to address the problems in mathematics. A study of maths exam questions revealed that students were unable to relate 75 percent of questions to their everyday experience or environment. Greater relevance to students’ lives, better continuity of learning content from one school year to the next and tailoring teaching more closely to individual students’ learning level are all quality attributes that we absolutely have to implement more systematically in mathematics teaching.

Olaf Köller, Managing Director of the
Leibniz Institute for Science and Mathematics Education (IPN) and STEM Proficiency Study lead

* Content only available in German