Germany faces an epochal challenge: to maintain its position as a leading industrial nation in the age of Artificial Intelligence. DeepTech – those highly innovative, fundamental technologies with transformative potential – is not an optional add-on, but the core of our future competitiveness.
This isn’t just a claim, but the clear finding of the current study by Boston Consulting Group (BCG) and the Bundesverband der Deutschen Industrie (BDI), which provides Germany with significant recommendations for dealing with DeepTech.
However, the path from brilliant research to industrial application is not a walk in the park. Many promising DeepTech projects fail not due to a lack of intelligence, but due to a fundamental misjudgment: they operate in a world that offers them only one or two dimensions. Yet, the reality in which value is created is decidedly three-dimensional.
The Lab Trap (1D Failure): When Brilliant Theory Can’t Survive the “Real-World Atmosphere”
The story behind it: Research and calculations are performed here – and at the highest level. But the world outside the lab is far more complex than the perfect model. Mathematical elegance doesn’t automatically translate into stable software, let alone robust production processes. There’s a lack of hard engineering and a keen eye for “Real World Constraints.”
Many of the BCG/BDI study’s recommendations, for example in the action area “Innovation, Research and Development” (KI11: Intensification of cooperation between industry and science), aim to break down this siloed thinking. But how?
This is the first part of a 4-part series on DeepTech leadership. In the next post, we will look at the ‘Prototype Wall’.