This article was the Topic of the Week in the newsletter of week 20 in 2025.

The innovative strength of the German economy is crucial for competitiveness, growth, and prosperity. Without creative ideas within companies, no new products, services, or business models "made in Germany" emerge. And these are urgently needed to compete in world markets. However, the innovation dynamism of companies in this country is stalling.

As the current DIHK economic survey shows, only about one in three industrial companies currently wants to invest in product innovations – noticeably less than in previous years. In mechanical engineering, automotive manufacturing, and medical technology, it is roughly four out of ten companies. However, even they lag behind their earlier commitments. The German economy now needs innovation accelerators to quickly become leaders in digital, climate, and energy technology.

Strengthening research and innovation is rightly one of the goals in the coalition agreement of the new federal government. This ranges from A for "Agency for Leap Innovations" to Z for future technologies. To get innovations back on track, speed and practicality are now required for three main innovation drivers in particular.

1. Planning reliability through strengthening established funding programs

To increase their innovation dynamics, companies need a multi-year – including financial – perspective for their innovation projects. This includes, in addition to tax incentives for research, established programs such as the Central Innovation Program for SMEs (ZIM), industrial community research (IGF), innovation competence INNO-KOM, or KMU-innovative. The coalition agreement already sets the right accents here. Besides a bureaucracy-light design of the programs, the government should especially ensure reliability and avoid application or approval stops as well as other short-term changed funding conditions.

2. More possibilities through real-world laboratories

Germany is the land of hidden champions. This is also due to a lively and diverse research and innovation environment, to which companies, universities, and research institutions particularly contribute. However, knowledge transfer is often not fast enough. In addition, innovative companies and those aspiring to be are too often hindered by excessive regulations from experimenting. Expanded freedoms are needed here so that companies can develop and test new products and solutions together with science – including those that would previously have been rejected by approval authorities. Real-world laboratories offer a better framework for this. The Bundestag should therefore quickly pass the Real-World Laboratories Act.

3. High-Tech Agenda as an important signal

With a new "High-Tech Agenda," politics wants to promote technology-open innovation ecosystems and research fields in defined so-called missions. Such an agenda is an important signal for the economy: It shows that innovations have a future in Germany – especially if the agenda stands for reliable innovation-friendly framework conditions and innovation accelerators. This also includes less bureaucracy in entrepreneurial practice, facilitating knowledge transfer between economy and science, and enough well-trained skilled workers.