Florian Berger

Managing Partner

Offices: Germany

Email: florian.berger@technopolis-group.com

Florian Berger is Managing Partner of Technopolis Germany and Co-Managing Director/Geschäftsführer of the German subsidiary, heading its Frankfurt office. He has longstanding, broad expertise in science, innovation and education policies with a focus on higher education policy, including business-university cooperation, research policy and career support for young researches. He has furthermore worked extensively on German and EU innovation policies, specifically public support mechanisms for innovation among SMEs. His thematic expertise covers various topics around regulatory framework conditions of innovation such as Intellectual Property Rights and standardisation, but also on the impacts of digitisation on economy and society as well as sustainability issues.

He currently leads an evaluation of the German Tenure-Track-Programm for the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and recently completed his work on monitoring the programme “Innovative Hochschule” (BMBF), targeted at universities cooperating in innovation partnerships with regional businesses and societal partners.

The project builds on similar experiences in the area of knowledge transfer at Universities for Applied Sciences. He has also worked on various education fields from Higher Education to Vocational Education and has conducted different European-wide studies on EU and Member States’ science and education policy initiatives (e.g. European Strategy for Universities, ET 2020). In various projects the European University Alliances have been a topic of interest in Florian’s projects.

Other clients of Florian include the German Research Foundation, the DAAD, the German Federal Foreign Office and others. Recently, he is also carrying out a number of evaluation projects for the private foundation sector in Germany (e.g. for Stiftung Mercator, VolkswagenStiftung, Carl-Zeiss-Stiftung).

In the area of innovation policy, he completed various evaluations of German innovation programmes for SMEs (e.g. ZIM, IGP) or for break-through innovators, often for the German Federal Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate Action.

Furthermore, he has worked on standardisation policy for DIN, BMWK, the Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation, Building, Nuclear Safety and Consumer Protectin (BMUB) and the Federal Environment Agency. In the past, he has also worked on several evaluations of IP support programmes for SME of the European Commission and has analysed challenges of IP protection and management in different industries, including .

Florian Berger has management and strategic leadership experience in projects ranging from smaller studies to multi-year, multi-partner projects for national and international clients. He has excellent skills in quantitative data analysis including multivariate methods, but also in qualitative approaches such as expert interviews or case studies. He has supported, moderated and managed a number of peer reviews, high ranking expert panels and audits and has himself been a member of expert panels in the higher education sector.

He holds a doctorate degree from Technische Universität Berlin, where he worked at the Chair for Innovation Economics from 2008 to 2010. Prior to joining Technopolis in 2012, he worked at a German higher education funding organisation and consulted in innovation management. Apart from his project reports, Florian has published in important journals in the field of STI policy such as Research Policy, Journal of Technology Transfer and Journal of Economics and Statistics.