Germany is in an excellent position when compared with its international competitors. Measuring technological strength is a multidimensional exercise. The indicators include the number of international patent registrations, the world market share of technology-based products, measurements of productivity, the question of research and development investment abroad, and the proportion of specialist personnel with higher qualifications.

The answer is: their combination. Germany is the leader when it comes to innovations that combine products and associated services, so-called product-related services. That can entail many things: maintenance contracts, capital goods in conjunction with financing options or even wellness packages combined with pharmaceuticals. No other economy in the world is as strong as Germany in combining new products and services. That is our special recipe for success – unfortunately, this goes largely unnoticed and is a victim of the statistics, which cannot gauge that in a precise way.

Education is and remains the advantage that strengthens Germany’s position in international competition. That involves, for example, the dual system of training in vocational schools and at the workplace as well as higher education in the engineering sciences. Other countries do not have such a technically oriented system of training.

Yes, the car industry is the motor of Germany’s technological achievement and has an impact that reaches far into other sectors. It provides the stimulus for technological innovations in electronics and electrical engineering, in the chemical industry and in telecommunications – for example, among suppliers of automatic antilock braking systems or in the case of the GPS positioning system. That represents an advantage, but it is also an Achilles heel, because a decline in demand in this one sector can threaten the innovative force of German industry overall.

We are already leaders in the field of environmental technology and renewable energy sources. The electricity industry has seen the writing on the wall, and we are now catching up in that field – whether with wind turbines or solar systems.

For many years now, Germany has been the number one in biotechnology. It is far ahead of Great Britain when you compare the number of patent registrations in this field. The same applies to nanotechnology. If there is a research deficit in Germany at all, then it relates to early consideration of the risks of nanotechnology. Nanoparticles are smaller than viruses and can cross all the barriers in the human body. That needs to be investigated early on, otherwise it could later lead to a crisis of acceptance.

German small and medium-sized enterprises are innovative in both absolute and relative terms, but they do not always have the marketing capability to demonstrate that worldwide. Smaller businesses tend to globalize less than large corporations. That means that their innovative successes mainly lead to the creation of new jobs at home.

It functions exceptionally well in Germany. Innovative companies pass problems that they cannot solve themselves back to the research sector early on, thereby steering the research efforts of the institutes. Germany’s public research system is strongly oriented to the needs of industry and supplies not only personnel, but also solutions.

A large research organization like the Fraunhofer Society must constantly ask itself whether it is heading in the right direction. In order to improve motivation and orientation in applied research, we defined 12 leading-edge fields of innovation that we anticipate will provide a significant stimulus to science and industry in coming years. They include, for example, accelerated drug development and digital medicine, customized energy supply and integrated production. Innovative breakthroughs are possible outside these 12 leading-edge fields, and an additional list of promising areas has already been compiled. That list encompasses everything we can conjecture today with a clear conscience. A “journey” into the future is not as unpredictable as you might think; we know too much about the ideas already “in the pipeline” for that.