University of Jena is a founding member of the "Startup Campus Alliance"

Eight universities in Saxony and two in Thuringia have founded the "Startup Campus Alliance" in Leipzig on 9 April 2025. They want to use the association to sustainably promote entrepreneurship and start-up culture and establish Saxony and Thuringia as the leading deep tech start-up region in Germany.

Deep tech (short for "deep technology") stands for technologies and companies that offer solutions based on significant scientific or technical innovations.

The founding members of the "Startup Campus Alliance" are:

• Leipzig University
• Dresden University of Technology
• Chemnitz University of Technology
• TU Bergakademie Freiberg
• Dresden University of Applied Sciences
• Leipzig University of Applied Sciences for Technology, Economics and Culture
• Institution of higher education Mittweida
• HHL Leipzig Graduate School of Management
• Friedrich Schiller University Jena
• Ernst Abbe University of Applied Sciences Jena

The "Startup Campus Alliance" aims to strategically pool the strengths of the universities in Saxony and Thuringia and thereby create effective synergies. Joint teaching formats, shared infrastructure and interdisciplinary cooperation create innovative support programmes for talented people and teams interested in founding a company.

A central component of the alliance is to make successes in the field of university spin-offs visible and thus strengthen the public perception of Saxony and Thuringia as start-up locations - both nationally and internationally. "In addition, the cross-university cooperation contributes significantly to the further development of the regional start-up ecosystem. After all, most start-up ideas already come from the institutions of higher education," says Leipzig University Professor Utz Dornberger, who was elected chair of the alliance.

Spin-offs create jobs and innovative strength

"Friedrich Schiller University Jena regularly produces start-ups that successfully establish themselves on the market - 80 per cent of our technology-oriented spin-offs are still active after five years," declares the President of the University of Jena, Prof. Dr Andreas Marx. "At the same time, we generate far more findings and innovations than have so far been directly transferred into practice. The new Alliance is therefore a valuable impulse to further strengthen our start-up culture. I am looking forward to the cross-border cooperation and am convinced that we will create even more jobs in the future and sustainably promote the innovative strength of Central Germany," says Prof. Marx.

The organisational basis for the collaboration is the non-profit association "Startup Campus Alliance". The association serves as a coordinating platform that can be used to efficiently bundle and strategically align the diverse activities of start-up support at institutions of higher education.

In addition, the association structure enables joint representation of interests in the Business Opportunities Ost (boOst) Ecosystem gGmbH, which is currently being founded in parallel to the establishment of the alliance. In addition to the savings banks in Saxony, SpinLab in Leipzig and TUDAG, talks are currently being held with other private investors. This strong partnership is intended to support the founding of innovative start-ups from the institutions of higher education.

boOst gGmbH is applying for the "Startup Factories" competition organised by the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Protection, which supports selected German startup ecosystems in the development of knowledge-based spin-offs. The aim is to develop a model for a thematically or regionally oriented "Startup Factory" that operates as a private-law organisation outside the university framework.