Germany: High-tech region Munich generating the next wave of scalable startups

During the last 150 years Munich has grown to one of the leading hightech clusters in Europe and is now home to a large number of mature corporations, small and medium enterprises (SMEs), universities, research and development centers and various service providers. Munich experienced exceptional economic growth in the second half of the 19th century and after World War II. In both periods companies like MAN, MunichRe, Allianz, Siemens and BMW developed into leading corporations within the local ecosystem and became big global players. Despite its entrepreneurial history and its ongoing economic success, however, the Munich ecosystem has not continued producing a large number of innovative high-growth companies in the last decades. To face this challenge Technische Universität München (TUM), which is the alma mater of world famous innovators and entrepreneurs like Carl von Linde, Rudolf Diesel, Claude Dornier and Willy Messerschmitt and which claims to be ‘The Entrepreneurial University’, has developed a strategic innovation program called TUM Entrepreneurship. The central goal of this university-wide action plan is to initiate more scalable high-tech startups. In addition to recruiting entrepreneurship professors and developing a technology transfer office, the university, with the continuous help of a private funder, has established a large entrepreneurship center called UnternehmerTUM, which serves as an enabler for high-growth ventures.