Erring Upwards

I. A sentence to begin with

The Chinese experiment and err their way upwards. The Germans already know everything and conduct experiments only in their ivory towers.

The sentence is pointed and in this form untenable. What it contains is nonetheless testable — and what survives the test is more uncomfortable than the exaggeration.

II. What an experiment is

An experiment is not an attempt to be proved right. It is an attempt to confirm or to refute an assumption — and either outcome is a result.

From this follows something that counts in ordinary life as a defect: a failure, too, is a result. It supplies a direction, and often the more useful one, because a confirmation says only that one may carry on, whereas a refutation says where things might possibly lead. It forces one to think again — or to give up.

Whoever merely calculates, by contrast, gets no direction at all, only the confirmation of what he fed into the calculation.

„Erring upwards“ is therefore not a turn of phrase but an exact description of a procedure: every solution creates new problems, and the new problems are, with luck, easier to solve than the old ones.

And from this follows the real test of a society — not how much it researches, but: where is it permitted to err, and what does it cost?

III. China: a country that experiments avowedly

This is meant neither as praise nor as warning, but as an observation of a case.

The Chinese special economic zones were established at the end of the 1970s expressly as an experiment — after decades of centrally planned isolation. First four places: Shenzhen, Zhuhai, Shantou, Xiamen. Later Hainan as well. The rest of the country was left untouched.

What is remarkable is the design. What was tried out was not a measure but an order: the zones were granted the right to their own legislation and, in economic administration, the same rights as a province. They were permitted, that is, to alter the rules under which they worked.

The attitude behind it stands in Deng’s well-known sentence: it does not matter whether the cat is black or white, so long as it catches mice. That is a refusal of doctrine in favour of the result.

IV. And the bill for it

Whoever tries much produces much damage. That belongs to the procedure, not beside it.

The one-child policy is today regarded by specialists as the worst political error of the post-Mao era; all restrictions on the number of children were lifted in 2021. With the special economic zones too, corrections had to be made in 1996, because inefficiency and corruption prevented the hoped-for success. And the consequences of the construction boom and of municipal indebtedness have not been worked off to this day.

Whoever speaks of Chinese experiments must therefore name both. A procedure that permits errors produces errors — and some of them are enormous.

V. What is actually the case in Germany

Here the opening sentence must be corrected, and in two respects.

First, the road from the institute into industry does exist. The Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft runs more than eighty establishments with 31,000 staff and 3.6 billion euros a year. And since 1973 its funding model has rewarded precisely what is being demanded: the level of core funding is set in dependence on earnings from industry. Only about thirty per cent comes as institutional support; the rest has to be earned.

Whoever claims that Germany has no bridge between research and industry has not looked.

Second, however, contract research is not an experiment. Whoever researches on behalf of a company works on that company’s problem, to its objectives, on its timetable — and the result belongs to the client. That is a service.

And a funding model that measures earnings from industry reliably rewards what reliably earns: the small step. It is our metric problem applied to research — what is measurable gets measured, and therefore what gets measured is what comes into being.

VI. Why that sufficed for decades

And it worked. Steady improvement carried the German economy a long way, and it is an art of its own, not to be belittled.

Only, a lead built on steady improvement rests on the others not catching up. Incremental work is now within many countries’ reach. Once the gap has been closed, one stands there with a well-oiled apparatus that reliably produces small things.

What is then missing is neither diligence nor competence. It is the leap — and the leap is not rewarded by the model, because a leap cannot be expressed in advance as earnings.

VII. The towers

At the other end stands basic research.

Nobody here can judge its quality, and this text does not attempt to. Two observations can nonetheless be recorded, and they are of different weight.

The one is no reproach: basic research does not convert anything into products. That is its nature, not its failure. Whoever researches fundamentals is precisely not supposed to squint at exploitability — otherwise he is no longer researching fundamentals.

The other is a reproach: between the institutes there are few connections. They work alongside one another.

And that is the graver matter, for something is lost there that neither side would have had alone. A contradiction shows itself only when two statements stand side by side. Where nothing stands side by side, there are no contradictions either — and hence no direction.

VIII. The gap that belongs to nobody

With that the place at issue is named.

Between the institute that has found something and the company that wants to sell something lies a region for which no institution is responsible: trying things out without a client and without pressure to exploit.

Basic research may not go there, because it would then no longer be basic research. Contract research does not get there, because there is no client. The company does not enter, because the outcome is uncertain and the bill starts at once.

In China this space belongs to the state. It sets up zones, gives them their own rules and watches what comes of it — with all the costs that entails.

Here it belongs to nobody.

And because it belongs to nobody, nobody misses it either. There is no metric for what does not come into being.

IX. It has been attempted

That is not conjecture. There is a case, and it is instructive.

At the end of the 1990s, Aachen and Heerlen founded the Avantis European Science and Business Park — forty hectares directly on the German-Dutch border, an EU model project, twelve thousand jobs planned. The idea was exactly the right one: a place where different rules apply from those all around.

The course of events reads like a textbook.

The state treaty on tax harmonisation was not concluded until December 2007 — almost ten years after construction began. EU law had simply been overlooked. Conservation associations blocked matters for years with actions concerning the European hamster; in the European Parliament it emerged that one association had its own complaint assessed by one of its own members as expert.

Instead of twelve thousand high-technology jobs there came an Amazon distribution centre, a pharmaceutical logistics operation and a warehouse.

And the reason for the failure is the instructive part. Avantis had no legal order of its own. It was a business park under two national legal orders, both of which applied in full. No new space was created; two old ones were laid on top of one another.

What has since taken its place is called a regulatory sandbox or experimental space: limited in time, bounded by subject, with the object of the trial fixed in advance.

A space in which it is settled what may be tried is not an experimental space. It is a demonstration.

X. What follows

Not the recommendation to do as China does. The costs of that procedure stand above, and they are considerable.

Rather a question that might be asked before the next funding guideline is written: where in this country may something be attempted that nobody has yet ordered?

Not in basic research — that is supposed to do something else. Not in contract research — that has a client. Not in the company — there the bill is running.

What remains is the individual who does it at his own expense. And about his position enough has been said elsewhere.

There is a further-reaching answer, and it too stands elsewhere: a territory detached from the existing legal order by a constitutional act and given its own commercial, permitting and procedural law — not as a business park and not as a sandbox, but as a foundation. Whoever wants to know it will find it under the name Zona Nova.

This text does not make that proposal. It merely records that the gap which gives rise to it does in fact exist — and that it belongs to nobody.