Fraunhofer is (by now) only financed 30% through tax money and 70% comes from the royalties on their past developments like MP3 and H264 and H265 and MPEG-H.
Anyway, Fraunhofer gets recurring tax funding. What voize got is a one-off research grant to a group of companies:
- voize
- Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin (a medical university)
- Deutsches Forschungszentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz GmbH, Berlin (a government AI research lab)
- Connext Communication GmbH, Paderborn (a tech company)
- Kleeblatt Pflegeheime gGmbH, Ludwigsburg (a retirement home, i.e. potential end user)
- Pflegewohnhaus am Waldkrankenhaus gGmbH, Berlin (another retirement home)
For this grant type, it's quite common that you pay the inventors, some assistant companies, some researchers, and some end users a lump sum to force them all to work together on commercializing the invention.
That’s not quite right for Fraunhofer: The financing model is also heavily dependent on research grants. The base funding is indeed around 30%. But another 40% are from publicly funded research projects. The last 30% are from research contracted by industry. In 2023, license fee revenue was €157M / €2991M, so roughly 5% of total contract research volume.
Anyway, Fraunhofer gets recurring tax funding. What voize got is a one-off research grant to a group of companies:
- voize
- Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin (a medical university)
- Deutsches Forschungszentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz GmbH, Berlin (a government AI research lab)
- Connext Communication GmbH, Paderborn (a tech company)
- Kleeblatt Pflegeheime gGmbH, Ludwigsburg (a retirement home, i.e. potential end user)
- Pflegewohnhaus am Waldkrankenhaus gGmbH, Berlin (another retirement home)
For this grant type, it's quite common that you pay the inventors, some assistant companies, some researchers, and some end users a lump sum to force them all to work together on commercializing the invention.