Stories about entrepreneurship are often about garages where the really big ideas are born, kitchen tables in shared flats where the world expansion is being prepared – or about young people who want to initiate the decline of Google and Amazon between table football duels. It is the image of revolutionaries and lone fighters who want to change the course of the world with their ideas.
These are all wonderful stories, but unfortunately they paint a completely wrong picture of entrepreneurship, worse still, they fuel a mistake that has led to wrong innovation policies for years: a little money, a dinner with the Minister for Economic Affairs, a few photos with the Chancellor – otherwise wait for any miracles to tumble out of any garage.
The truth is that young tech companies very rarely come out of thin air. Entrepreneurship, especially in technology, does not happen by accident. It is the result of excellent training, good connections to science, traditional companies that are keen to experiment, real role models, investors who are willing to take risks – and above all, functioning networks that bring all of this together.
Therefore, a lively start-up landscape is also a cultural question. Above all, however, it is the result of political will.
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Not because the state is the better entrepreneur. But because the state has to set the framework in which the sensitive innovation networks can thrive. This is shown by the admired innovation centers of this world: Silicon Valley, for example, where such networks of corporations, young high-tech companies and military research have been developing since the 1960s.
The development in Israel was similar. And recently, French President Emmanuel Macron has also shown how such a high-tech ecosystem can be built up in just a few years.
The largest start-up center in Europe is in Munich
There is also an example of this in Germany: the UnternehmerTUM network. The start-up center at the Technical University of Munich is the largest of its kind in Europe. In 2021 alone, the center introduced 6,000 people to entrepreneurship issues in various formats and supported more than 500 teams who are thinking about founding a start-up.
The result of this work is impressive. 80 start-ups are created in the network every year. But what is particularly impressive is that of the more than 17 billion euros that flowed into German start-ups in 2021, a good 3.5 billion went to companies from the Munich network. The air taxi service Lilium, which is valued at about 790 million euros on the US technology exchange Nasdaq, is part of this network. Furthermore, the train and bus platform Flix and the two software providers Personio and Celonis, which are now among the most valuable start-ups in the country. UnternehmerTUM was initiated and largely financed by Susanne Klatten from the fourth generation of the Quandt dynasty.
Klatten became something like the invisible hand of the German start-up scene. She had the idea “that we need more family businesses, founders who make their business ideas their own so that they become their life’s work,” said Klatten in an interview with the Handelsblatt.
The Technical University in Munich and the Bavarian state government recognized the potential of the idea early on, got involved and supported young companies with infrastructure in research or location promotion.
Founders from the network usually tell the same story: UnternehmerTUM and the university taught them early on to think about which problems are worth solving as entrepreneurs. They offered training, business plan workshops, help with prototypes and mentors to get you started.
And particularly important: UnternehmerTUM, founded as an institute affiliated with the university, acts as a real start-up scout and speaks to potential entrepreneurs among the students at an early stage, asking them whether they would like to turn their ideas into their own company.
Entrepreneurship is certainly also an attitude of people who want to change the future. But it is at least as much the result of hard work and strategic will. It is good that the federal government has designed a start-up strategy for the first time. It addresses the financing problem, the shortage of skilled workers and makes employee participation a little easier. But this strategy is not yet a big hit.
There is no concrete target image of what is to be achieved with the plan. Many points are also formulated vaguely, for example the question of what proportion of their money insurance companies and pension funds are allowed to invest in venture capital. The main problem, however, is that nobody in the federal government has really made this a top priority. As far as that goes, Susanne Klatten is a real role model.
More: Podcast Handelsblatt Disrupt – Ways out of the German innovation crisis