Germany and France want to keep fast-growing startups in the EU

Successful startups must have access to capital and must be able to grow within the European Union, the largest single market in the world, added Klingbeil.

“The fact is that we are still far behind our potential,” emphasized Klingbeil, who is also a vice chancellor in the German government.

Europe has a strong “startup ecosystem”, but too few of its companies achieve the position of world leader, the minister said.

“That’s exactly what we want and need to change,” Klingbeil pointed out, noting that their goal is for growing, innovative companies from the EU to become global leaders.

In order to achieve this, the gap between available and necessary financial resources for innovative startups needs to be bridged, added the German Minister of Finance.

The former German finance minister Jörg Kukies and the former governor of the French central bank Christian Noyer proposed in the report that capital for innovation be provided by measures such as the reform of pension systems, according to the news agency dpa.

Kukies and Noyer also suggest the creation of a single corporate legal structure at the EU level, Dpa reminds.

Germany’s innovation capacity is stagnating, according to the 12th place in the ranking of countries ranked by capacity for innovation, according to a 2025 study by the Association of German Industry (BDI) and the consulting company Roland Berger at the end of November last year.

The key problem is that German companies spend less on research and development than companies in other countries, especially in the field of digitization, where Germany lags behind the USA and China.

In 2025, the top of the list of countries with the greatest capacity for innovation was taken by Switzerland, followed by Singapore and Denmark.

Germany is fourth in key technologies overall and among the top five in four out of seven technology areas, including the circular economy, new materials and new production technologies, but lags behind in key future-oriented areas and is in seventh place in digital hardware, tenth in digital networking and fifteenth in biotechnology.

Roland Berger found that Germany is particularly weak in future technologies, including digitalization and biotechnology.