Georg Metzger of the ZEW, German Centre for European Economic Research, uses GfK GeoMarketing maps to record the regional distribution of company start-ups in the high-tech industry.

The ZEW is a non-profit economic research institute founded in 1990 on the initiative of the German federal state of Baden-Württemberg, business companies and the University of Mannheim. The ZEW is active in the field of applied empirical business research. Its central tasks are business research, political economic consulting and knowledge transfer.

The ZEW start-up report is representative of numerous reports available from the ZEW. The ZEW start-up report covers the start-up situation in Germany every 6 months and presents new ZEW results in start-up research. ZEW regularly uses map material by GfK GeoMarketing to illustrate regional differences in the start-up situation. With the help of cartographical presentation, regional differences in the levels of start-ups can be shown in a detailed and impressive manner.

Map presentations were also used for the latest ZEW study “High-Tech Start-ups in Germany“. The study was conducted by ZEW at the request of the business magazine “impulse“ and Microsoft Germany. One part of the study concerned the progress of start-up activity in technology and science-intensive sectors of business between 1995 and 2005; here the regional distribution of new companies also was observed.

The incidence of start-ups across Germany varies greatly by region. In the high-tech sector in particular, there are so-called cluster formations, e.g. a concentration of start-ups in certain regions. Clusters often develop in areas of agglomeration where major companies are located; this favors the establishment of supplier companies. In Germany, an especially high concentration of technology-oriented start-ups can be found in the regions of Hamburg, Berlin, Rhine/Ruhr, Rhine/Main, Rhine/Neckar, Stuttgart and Munich.

Observing the incidence of start-ups based on the absolute number of start-ups ignores the fact that the potential for start-ups in these cluster areas is higher as a rule simply because more people live and work there. In order to abstract from the population size, a standardized measure of start-up activity must be included. A suitable indicator is the intensity of start-ups (startups per 10,000 workers). This allows a regional comparison of start-ups independent of the number of potential founders, i.e. Inhabitants of a region; thus, it is a measure of the inhabitants` tendency to establish a company.

There is a south-north slope and a west-east slope when observing the technology and science-intensive sectors of industry. The number of all high-tech areas has an aboveaverage level in Bavaria and Baden- Württemberg. With the exception of high-value technology, this also applies for Hesse and for Thuringia with respect to technology-intensive sectors in the processing industries.

Below-average start-up intensity in the high-tech sector can be seen primarily in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and Saxony-Anhalt.

As can be seen by comparing the figures, regions with a high concentration of start-ups are not necessarily identical with regions that demonstrate a high number of start-ups in absolute terms. Regarding top technology, areas such as Berlin and the Rhine/Ruhr appear less as clusters, if the level of concentration instead of the number of start-ups in a region is observed. By contrast, an above-average level of start-up concentration can be found in the Lake Constance region and the technology region of Karlsruhe in Southwest Germany. For the high quality technology sector there are similar findings.