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IGNITE 2027: registration open, 10% early bird rate until 15 November
Are you an innovation leader at a university, public agency, or technology hub? Join us in March in Munich for our TUMint flagship executive training programme on catalysing innovation ecosystems!
Registration
Please contact the TUMint team via academy@tum-international.com for any questions or interest in the program. Registrations before the 15th of November receive a 10% discount.
Learning from the inside: why TUM International is bringing innovation leaders to Munich
In March 2027, TUM International opens the Munich innovation ecosystem to a cohort of senior leaders from universities, companies and public institutions. Its flagship executive programme, IGNITE, starts from a simple observation: ecosystems are far easier to admire than to build.
On Freddie-Mercury-Straße, in Munich’s Kreativquartier, stands a five-storey building that the City of Munich and UnternehmerTUM opened in June 2021 as the Munich Urban Colab. Founding teams work on one floor, city departments test smart-city ideas on another, and corporate partners book rooms for workshops with start-ups. TUM International has its offices here as well. For many international visitors, this building is the first place where the abstract idea of an innovation ecosystem takes on a physical shape.
Those visitors tend to arrive with the same questions. How did a public technical university become one of Europe’s most productive sources of start-ups? Who made which decisions, and in what order? And could any of it work at home? IGNITE, a three-day executive programme from 15 to 17 March 2027, is TUM International’s attempt to answer those questions in depth, with the people who were involved.
A concept that is easy to name and hard to build
Few terms appear in innovation strategies as often as “ecosystem”, and few are used as loosely. In a widely cited conceptual review, Ove Granstrand and Marcus Holgersson (2020) propose a narrower definition: an innovation ecosystem is the evolving set of actors, activities and artefacts, together with the institutions and relations between them, that matter for the innovative performance of an actor or a population of actors. The value of the definition lies in where it directs attention. It looks past individual organisations to the connections that link them.
That perspective has a longer history in research on universities and industry. The Triple Helix model developed by Henry Etzkowitz and Loet Leydesdorff (2000) describes innovation as the product of interaction between universities, industry and government, in which each partly takes on roles traditionally held by the others. Two years earlier, Burton Clark had studied five European universities that reinvented themselves during the 1980s and 1990s, among them Warwick and Chalmers. His conclusion was that change rarely came from a single initiative. It required a strengthened steering core, a growing periphery of units working with external partners, a broader funding base, academic departments willing to take part, and a culture that held these elements together.
Munich as a case
Munich offers an unusual opportunity to observe these dynamics at close range. TUM has described itself as “The Entrepreneurial University” for years. UnternehmerTUM, founded in 2002 by the entrepreneur Susanne Klatten in close partnership with the university, supports founding teams from a first idea to market entry. Venture Labs organised around specific technology fields bring researchers, founders and industry partners together. According to figures published by TUM and its partners, more than 1,100 start-ups have emerged from the university, with a combined valuation above €10 billion. Global companies, a state government investing in artificial intelligence and deep tech, and foundations with long time horizons complete the setting.
Describing such a system is considerably easier than reproducing it. Legal frameworks, funding cultures and regional histories differ, and an arrangement that works in Bavaria may stall elsewhere. This is the starting point for the design of IGNITE. The programme presents Munich as a case to be examined rather than a template to be installed, including the decisions that took years and the questions that remain open.
From individual visits to a programme
TUM International GmbH was founded in 2007 as a wholly owned subsidiary of the Technical University of Munich. With partners around the world, it works on university site development, knowledge and technology transfer, innovation ecosystem acceleration, and talent management. In these projects, one request comes up again and again: partners want to see the Munich ecosystem for themselves and speak with the people who run it. Until now, such visits were arranged one by one. IGNITE gathers them into a structured programme with a cohort, a curriculum and a defined result.
The three days follow a deliberate sequence. The first examines the Munich model itself: how it is governed, where the incentives lie, and how strategy is set. The second turns to the links between science and industry, with a visit to a corporate site, a session with the Bavarian AI Agency, and practical work on technology transfer and intellectual property. On the third day, participants shift the focus to their own institutions. In an Action Lab, each of them develops a roadmap, presents it to the cohort for critique, and commits to concrete first steps.
The contributors reflect the breadth of the ecosystem. They include Prof. Dr. Helmut Schönenberger of UnternehmerTUM; Prof. Dr. Gerhard Kramer and Prof. Dr. Isabell Welpe of TUM; Prof. Dr. Gunther Friedl of the Dieter Schwarz Foundation; Dr. Michael Klimke of the Bavarian AI Agency; the founder Thomas Kirchner, whose companies ProGlove and YETI grew out of the TUM ecosystem; and Friederike Hettinger, Managing Director of TUM International.
Why the mix of participants matters
IGNITE is aimed at vice presidents for research and innovation, deans, rectors and provosts, heads of technology transfer, corporate innovation leaders, government innovation leads, regional development agencies and funders. The composition follows from the research described above. If innovation depends on interaction between sectors, the people who lead those sectors gain from learning side by side, and from hearing how the same partnership looks from the other side of the table.
The first cohort, and what follows
The 2027 cohort is the first. TUM International will collect feedback from participants and contributors during and after the programme and use it to shape later editions. Alumni follow-up is part of the format, so that the roadmaps drafted in Munich can be revisited once participants are back at their desks.
Whether those roadmaps change anything will be decided at home, in the institutions where the participants work. What three days in Munich can provide is a close view of how one ecosystem actually functions, conversations with those who built it, and a group of peers working on the same problem in very different places.
IGNITE 2027 takes place from 15 to 17 March 2027 in Munich. Programme details, contributors and registration: https://tum-international.com/en/contact/
References
Clark, B. R. (1998). Creating Entrepreneurial Universities: Organizational Pathways of Transformation. Oxford: Pergamon for the International Association of Universities.
Etzkowitz, H., & Leydesdorff, L. (2000). The dynamics of innovation: From National Systems and “Mode 2” to a Triple Helix of university, industry and government relations. Research Policy, 29(2), 109 to 123.
Granstrand, O., & Holgersson, M. (2020). Innovation ecosystems: A conceptual review and a new definition. Technovation, 90/91, 102098.