In mid-November, the budget committee of the German Bundestag unblocked the funds for the "German Agency for Transfer and Innovation" (DATI), which is still to be set up, but as long as the ministry has not yet presented a "conclusive concept", most of the money for the project will remain blocked .

The “Transferkompass” recently published by the Stifterverband für die Deutsche Wissenschaft could be very useful when making a decision.

Last year, 156 German universities took part in the survey sponsored by the Federal Ministry of Economics on the strategic anchoring of transfer activities.

According to the authors of the study, their answers could help to clarify the question as to why research is only benefiting under-proportionally from the increasing expenditure on research and development by companies.

According to the university finance statistics from Destatis, the percentage of third-party funds that come from business fell from 26 to 18 percent of all third-party funds at German universities from 2006 to 2017.

According to the authors, this does not speak for a constant transfer of scientific knowledge between universities and companies.

The universities have at least recognized the importance of the topic: in 2013 only 28 percent of them had their own transfer strategy, now 58 percent of the participating universities state that they want to use such a strategy to specifically promote cooperation, especially with research-based companies in their region.

This is fundamentally optimistic, but if you ask the universities about the actual relevance of knowledge transfer in comparison with their other tasks, it comes off very poorly: out of a hundred points that they have to distribute in the corresponding survey, they give teaching on average 43 and research 25. But only nine points relate to the transfer of one's own services to the economy and just seven points to those in civil society,

Little works without state support

So are transfer strategies just for the shop window?

In any case, according to the study, their importance as "operative instructions for daily practice" is to be assessed as very low.

This also applies to universities that are legally obliged by their country to develop a transfer strategy or through their participation in funding measures such as the "Innovative University" program.

In addition, these strategies tend to be developed from the point of view of the universities, while the perspective of potential transfer partners is given little consideration.

In general, interest in these partners does not seem to be very pronounced.

At least 36 percent of the universities stated that they systematically record this need, but only 24 percent of the universities of applied sciences (HAW) that are said to be predestined for the transfer.