Regional Innovation Support Systems and Technopoles - Technopolis: Best Practices for Science and Technology Cities - page 51

The Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology (BMWi) allocates an
annual €450 million to innovation in the form of support programmes for inno-
vative SMEs, industrial collaborative research and priority projects in the area of
energy and civil aeronautics. The federal and Länder governments have joint
responsibility for a number of policies, including forward planning in education,
the expansion of existing and construction of new universities and major infra-
structure equipment. They jointly support Germany's research organisations,
including the German Research Association (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft—
DFG), the Max Planck and Fraunhofer Societies and Germany's Academies of
Science. They are also responsible for harmonising the regulations and syllabuses
for further education and vocational training. In general, technology policy in
Germany is marked by a high degree of sectoral selectivity which results from the
dominance of direct project support (Klodt 1998 ). Its second main feature is the
persistence of public research institutions, although technological priorities have
significantly changed over time.
Due to its co-operative federalism that is characterised by a strong interde-
pendence between the federal government and the Länder (regional states), many
government tasks in Germany are performed by the Länder (Berg 2011 ). Higher
education and technology policy are areas in which the Länder have their own
responsibilities. The regionalisation of technology policy soared particularly in
West Germany after Baden-Württemberg successfully started regional technology
consultancy centres in the 1980s (Cooke and Morgan 1998 ). Generally, each Land
has selected a wide range of regional technology policy measures to assist
enterprises in developing their innovative potentials, to build up a technology and
science infrastructure, to transfer information, to train employees technologically
and to promote business start-ups. In Germany, we can therefore find a system
which lies between grassroots and network systems in the old established Länder.
In the new Länder in eastern Germany, however, we can find a system which has,
due to strong support of the federal government, more dirigiste characteristics
(Koschatzky 2000 ). The latter, however, are clearly moving towards network
support systems, as the federal government is slowly decreasing its support.
Not only do Länder have a relatively strong position in innovation support in
Germany (innovation-oriented regional policy), also the central government has
discovered regions as an implementation platform of its innovation and technology
policy, which has been labelled regionalised national innovation policy (Kos-
chatzky 2000 ). One prominent example of this latest trend of regionalised national
innovation policy is the BioRegio contest, an initiative of the central government
to boost Germany's competitiveness in biotechnology. In a competitive procedure
three regions were selected for support, namely Munich, the Rhine-Neckar Tri-
angle and the Rhineland. According to Koschatzky ( 2000 , 17) the programme
contributed to increasing Germany's competitiveness in biotechnology to a con-
siderable extent.
Other initiatives with similar characteristics are the EXIST-University-based
start-ups and InnoRegio contests. EXIST focuses on supporting regional concepts
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co-operation between higher education institutes, companies and other