Image: Hans Christian Plambeck
Franziska Giffey
Mayor of Berlin and Senator for Economic Affairs, Energy and Public Enterprises More information
About Us
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Modern Berlin has become a global centre of innovation. It is Europe’s startup capital. Nowhere else are more companies being founded and more money being invested.
Service and technology have become the driving factors of modern Berlin. The city’s strength is due to a mixture of different sectors: a strong industry, a very vivid creative scene, an excellent scientific landscape, a large healthcare industry and a tourism sector that is visibly back on track after a very difficult time because of the pandemic.
An abundance of ideas along with excellence in research draw many entrepreneurs and business people to Berlin. In numbers, there are four public universities, seven schools of applied sciences and 30 private schools with almost 200.000 students combined. Numerous centres of Germany’s longstanding research institutions are located in the city: twelve Leibniz institutes, Max Planck (6), Fraunhofer (4), Helmholtz (3).
Nobody could have imagined this kind of success given that Berlin, for many years, was among the poorest states in the country and had to deal with the consequences of the division of Germany. Today, Berlin has one of the fastest growing economies, with a consecutive GDP growth in the last decade, far beyond the average growth rate of Germany.
Berlin is a fast growing city. It attracts people from other parts of Germany as well as worldwide. Within the coming years the German capital will potentially grow to be home to four million inhabitants.
The goal of the Senate Department for Economics, Energy and Public Enterprises is to secure Berlin’s recent leading position and to make it a global hub. 12 so called centres of future, local innovation parks for smart industries, are currently being developed.
Creating a network for electric vehicles, launching 5G sites for commercial enterprises and expanding 200 Mbit-internet over the entire city are other focal points in making Berlin a global leader for innovation in the digital age.
Our goal is to make Berlin a metropolis worth living in for many generations to come. Therefore we are working on the expansion of renewable energies, a successful energy and heat transition and transformation of our economy.