About Baden-Württemberg

Research infrastructure

Baden-Württemberg is one of the regions of Europe which may lay claim to the highest number of universities and colleges and the most intensive research activity. It has a sophisticated and highly developed research infrastructure in which the fields of fundamental research and application-oriented research with close links to industry are equally represented, and which is supplemented by a broad and intricate system of transfer institutes.

The Land has 9 universities, 2 private universities, 6 universities of education, 8 art colleges, 21 universities of applied sciences (15 of them with a technical orientation), 7 internally administered and 10 private colleges and 8 vocational academies, which are also considered part of the higher education system.

11 of the 80 Max Planck Institutes, 14 of the 58 Fraunhofer Institutes and 25% of the research capacity of the institutions of the Helmholtz Society, including the German Cancer Research Centre in Heidelberg, are based in the Land. A total of over 100 non-university research facilities in Baden-Württemberg maintain links with the Land's universities through a wide range of activities. More than 300 transfer centres of the Steinbeis Foundation in Baden-Württemberg consider their main sphere of competence to be the implementation of research results from the universities in industry through development projects, consultancy and training. The Steinbeis Transfer Centres are clustered predominantly at universities of applied sciences, but also increasingly at universities.

Within the European Union, Baden-Württemberg occupies the number one position. At the end of the 1990s it held the European record with an R&D spending intensity of 3.9%. In no other region of the EU is more being spent on research and development (in relation to GDP) than in the south west of Germany