Digital Transformation Across Macro, Meso & Micro Tiers

Funded by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action (BMWK) and partner ministries, HEALTH-X dataLOFT and its follow-on initiatives EHDS4ALL and Data4Good establish a sovereign European Health Data Space (EHDS) placing citizens at the center of primary care and secondary clinical research.

At Freie Universität Berlin, the team led by Univ.-Prof. Dr. Martin Gersch drives platform governance, multi-sided business model design, the citizen-facing Data Wallet App, and the non-profit association EHDA e.V. for common-good-oriented health data sharing. Complementing this infrastructure research, projects such as ReDiGe, EvalDiGe, and CaringS investigate the evaluation, reimbursement, and cross-sectoral integration of Digital Health Applications (DiGAs) and caring ecosystems.

How can artificial intelligence and next-generation digital infrastructures foster sustainable and resilient entrepreneurship across Europe? In the European AURORA seizmic (EIT-KIC) project, Univ.-Prof. Dr. Hannes Rothe and his team develop AI-driven mentorship frameworks that guide student and academic founders from initial concepts to viable, socially impactful business models.

Alongside Place Beyond Bytes and the CellPort 6G Startup Ecosystem, this research stream also investigates practice-based smart service systems (EJIS 2025), AI-driven sustainable digital transformation in industry, and entrepreneurial digital resilience of SMEs operating under extreme crisis conditions (HICSS 2026).

Going beyond surface-level demographics, Prof. Dr. Janina Sundermeier and her team investigate deep-level diversity dimensions—such as personality traits, cognitive styles, and gender-inclusive career aspirations—and their effects on startup team dynamics, investor evaluations, and venture networks (honored with multiple Best Paper Awards).

Through the Hello Diversity! Lab, Podcast & Meetup series, the WoMenventures teaching innovation fellowship, and Prof. Sundermeier's role as Ambassador for Women's Entrepreneurship in NFUSION (Entrepreneurs Network of Freie Universität Berlin), research findings are translated directly into inclusive startup ecosystems.

Funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) with €2.25 million, the RimA (Roboter im Alltag) transfer center supports competence centers in researching and developing intuitive human-robot interaction for service and assistance robots in everyday life and public spaces.

In collaboration with the University of Bonn (AIS) and Forschungszentrum Informatik (FZI), the Digital Entrepreneurship Hub and Department of Information Systems at Freie Universität Berlin (Univ.-Prof. Dr. Martin Gersch) lead Work Package 5 (AP5): Business Models for Assistive Robotics and connect findings with the Competence Center E-Commerce (CCEC).

Authored by Univ.-Prof. Dr. Hannes Rothe et al. in cooperation with Profund Innovation and Berlin Partner, the Deep Tech Futures Report: Bio- & HealthTech Startups in Berlin compares 134 Berlin-Brandenburg ventures against 182 startups in Cambridgeshire (UK) and 103 startups in top German hubs.

Combining Dealroom, Crunchbase, European Patent Office data, and 42 expert interviews, the report identifies six strategic levers: solving the scaling bottleneck, connecting local private investors, strengthening management specialization in founding teams, and internationalizing IP/patent portfolios.

Open bio-data infrastructures provide petabytes of genomic, proteomic, and clinical data freely to the global scientific community. Together with international scholars from UT Austin, Bentley University, University of Oslo, and EMBL-EBI / ELIXIR, we study how entrepreneurial ventures leverage open science commons to train machine learning models for drug discovery.