The Innovation Theatre

Germany spends more money on innovation promotion than most comparable economies. Measured against actual results — genuinely market-ready breakthroughs, supported individual inventors, real technology transfers — almost none of it is demonstrable. This is not an accident. It is the predictable outcome of an institutional landscape optimised for activity, not impact. And it is anything but new.

I. A Species with a Long History

The species in question goes by many names: technology centre, innovation centre, founder hub, MakerSpace, incubator, innovation agency. The names change with fashion. The underlying pattern has remained the same for decades.

In the 1980s, when the Ruhr region still had its structural transformation ahead of it, the first technology centres arose with funds from the Federal Ministry for Research and Technology. The idea was legitimate: inventors and founders were to gain access to machines, premises and advice that they could not afford on their own. In Dortmund, in Bochum, in Duisburg — everywhere institutions arose that were meant to "realise and scale" innovations.

What happened in practice describes a recurring pattern: the institutions had fixed costs — machines, staff, rent — that ran regardless of whether projects existed or not. When no inventors came, the bills still had to be paid. The simplest solution: deploy the machines and staff for paying clients. Contract manufacturing for small and medium-sized businesses. Courses for companies. Consulting services for enterprises that already knew what they wanted. In the end, subsidised institutions competed with the private Mittelstand — using taxpayers' money, at below-market prices, without market risk. Eventually many of these institutions were quietly buried, without a final report, without evaluation. The funding ran out. The machines were auctioned off.

II. The Mechanics of Failure

The failure always follows the same mechanics, and they are actually quite simple: an institution without a market test has no feedback telling it whether it is doing the right thing. It can do the wrong thing for years and still grow — as long as the funds keep flowing.

The first step is the founding with an ambitious mandate. Promote innovations. Support inventors. Accelerate the transfer of research into application. The mandate is broad enough that it never feels wrong — and immeasurable enough that it can never be shown to have failed.

The second step is the absence of the actual target group. The individual inventor, the lateral entrant, the small business owner without an academic network — they do not come. Not because they do not exist, but because the system is structurally not built for them. The application forms presuppose a registered company. The consulting services presuppose business plans. The networking events presuppose institutional affiliation. Those who do not fit the form are politely turned away or simply never called back.

The third step is substitution: the institution fills its capacity with what is actually in demand. Corporate courses. Company events. Contract manufacturing. Consulting for enterprises that already know what they want. This is not malice — it is survival logic. An institution with fifty employees and no actual target group has to serve someone.

The fourth step is communication: the institution counts what can be counted. Participants. Course attendances. Events. Network contacts. Square metres. Memberships. All input, no output. None of it says whether anything came into existence that would not have existed without the institution.

The institution never fails — because it has set itself no benchmark against which it could fail. It exists as long as the funds flow. And when the funds dry up, it was just "structural change".

III. The Upgraded Version: MakerSpace and UnternehmerTUM

What was still provisional and institutionally rough-edged in the 1980s has today found a polished, media-savvy form. The MakerSpace Munich and its parent organisation UnternehmerTUM are not a failure — they are the most professional execution of the same old pattern.

UnternehmerTUM was founded in 2002 by Susanne Klatten and is today, by its own account, Europe's largest founder centre with over 500 employees. In the current Financial Times ranking of European startup hubs it holds first place — ahead of Station F in Paris. The MakerSpace, opened in Garching in 2015 and expanded in Munich in 2021, counts over 33,500 users across ten years. The partner network includes BMW, Siemens, Henkel, Infineon, Würth and E.ON. The machines are real. The premises are of high quality. The operation is professional.

And yet: the underlying structural pattern is the same. The corporate membership is explicitly marketed — companies book access for their employees, pay course fees of 65 to 320 euros per person, and use the spaces for corporate events and hackathons. MTU Aero Engines has been a member for years — not to develop innovations, but to offer employees an incentive programme that their own workplace cannot provide. An engineer builds his guitar effects pedal. A designer makes a cat bowl stand. That is legitimate. It is simply not what the MakerSpace claims to be there for.

The Innovator scholarship — the programme explicitly designed to give access to founders without academic backgrounds — comprises six months of membership and two machine courses. That is it. No substantive coaching. No prototype support. No financing facilitation. No follow-up. Two courses, and then one is released.

The track record consists of names like Isar Aerospace and FlixMobility — companies that either existed before the MakerSpace or used it at most marginally, and that are claimed as success stories because they emerged somewhere in the orbit of TU Munich. This is the same attribution logic that characterises the entire system: whoever was nearby counts as a result.

IV. The Five Characteristics of the Species

After decades of observation, five structural characteristics can be identified that institutions of this species have in common — regardless of what they are called, who funds them, and which era they represent.

The first characteristic is the ambitious, unmeasurable mandate. "Promote innovations", "support inventors", "accelerate transfer" — formulations broad enough to encompass everything, and vague enough to never be wrong. An institution with a measurable mandate — "we bring ten inventions per year to market readiness" — would visibly fail. One with a diffuse mandate can never fail.

The second characteristic is the absence of a market test. The institution does not earn its money by producing results. It earns it through institutional affiliation, through funding grants, through foundation endowments — independent of outcome. This fundamentally decouples effort from impact. Those who cannot fail do not learn.

The third characteristic is the substitution of the target group. The declared target group — the inventor, the lateral entrant, the institutionally homeless — does not come, or appears only as a fig leaf. The paying target group — corporate employees, accredited startups, academically networked founding teams — fills the capacity. Over time the institution forgets that it was ever meant to be otherwise.

The fourth characteristic is the input metric as success communication. Participant numbers, events, square metres, memberships — all of this can be counted and communicated. Output metrics — how many inventions reached market readiness, how much private capital was mobilised, how many companies still exist in five years — are systematically not collected, because they would disturb the picture.

The fifth characteristic is institutional self-reproduction. The institution produces reports that demonstrate its value. It commissions evaluations that come out positive. It cultivates a media presence that tells its success stories. Over time the institution itself becomes the news — not because of its impact, but because of its existence. "Europe's largest startup hub" is a statement about size, not about impact.

V. Why the Species Survives

The question that arises is not why these institutions fail — that is structurally explicable. The real question is why they survive for so long, why new ones arise even though the old ones have demonstrated nothing.

The answer has three parts. First: the institutions fulfil real functions — just not the declared ones. They are networking platforms for institutional actors. They offer companies a PR-effective connection to the startup world. They create political visibility for decision-makers who want to "do something for innovation". That is not nothing. It is simply not what taxes are spent on.

Second: the political system rewards founding, not impact. Whoever opens a new innovation institution gets a press release, a minister and photographs. Whoever closes an old one because it has achieved nothing gets trouble. The incentive lies structurally on the side of founding, not abolishing. Germany therefore has over 500 founder centres and technology centres today — and not a single independent, consistently conducted impact evaluation of this landscape as a whole.

Third: the actual target group — the inventor whom none of these institutions genuinely helps — has no lobby. He has no institution behind him to carry his case publicly. He appears in no statistics, because he fits no form. Prof. Erich Häusser, former President of the German Patent Office, called this the "cartel of ignorance" in the mid-1990s — and warned that Germany would become a low-wage country again if this cartel could not be broken. Thirty years later the cartel is intact. The institutions have grown larger, the press releases more professional, the logos more modern. The underlying problem is the same.

VI. The UnternehmerTUM Variant as Progress?

It would be unfair to place UnternehmerTUM and the MakerSpace on the same level as the vanished BMFT institutions of the 1980s. There are real differences. The network connecting industry and capital is real. Some spin-offs are real. The infrastructure is high quality. Susanne Klatten's entrepreneurial founding impulse — not a pure research institution but an ecosystem with market orientation — is conceptually a step further than the typical subsidised tool shed of 1985.

And yet: the structural core is the same. The MakerSpace is primarily a service for institutionalised actors — TUM students, corporate employees, accredited startups — and an afterthought for everyone else. The scholarship is a fig leaf, not a core business. The attribution of success is reputation management, not evidence. And the question "how many of the 33,500 users developed something market-ready?" remains unanswered — because it is never asked.

What distinguishes UnternehmerTUM from its predecessors is not the structure. It is the communication. The 1980s institutions simply existed until the money ran out. UnternehmerTUM has learned to legitimise its existence — through rankings, through PR, through the appropriation of successes that arose in its vicinity. This is not a criticism of the intelligence of those involved. It is an observation about the system: whoever wants to survive learns how to produce legitimacy. Whoever does not learn how to produce legitimacy disappears.

VII. What a Different World Would Look Like

An institution that actually solves what it claims to solve would be characterised by three features that are almost nowhere to be found in the German innovation landscape.

It would have measurable output targets and name them publicly. Not "we promote innovations", but: "of a hundred projects we accompany in a year, twenty should still be in the market after three years, and five should have taken on private capital." That is a promise one can fail to keep. Those willing to make such a promise take their mandate seriously.

It would actively seek out those who do not come. The institutionally homeless — the inventor without a company, without a network, without academic affiliation — does not arrive on their own. They must be found. That requires different structures than an application portal and a kick-off event. It requires people who actively look for what the system normally does not see.

And it would know real consequences. Programmes that do not work are discontinued. Staff who produce no results are not retained. Institutions that miss their output targets for three consecutive years are not rewarded with increased funding. This sounds obvious. In the German innovation promotion landscape it is revolutionary.

The innovation theatre survives because nobody truly wants to know what comes out the back. The stage is beautiful, the actors are committed, the audience is satisfied. That the play tells nothing true — one grows accustomed to that.