I'm seeing more quality research from Fraunhofer in recent years that is also useful for practical purposes. They're preeminent with all things related to energy in Europe: smart meters, protocols, renewable energy data collection, dual-licensed GPL/commercial code in ths domain, e.g. openmuc.org. Applied science done right.
And both are the reason why German universities rank so badly in international rankings. They are attached to the universities, forming clusters, but their accomplishments are not measured anywhere.
This suggests that: a) German universities don't care that much about international rankings, and b) organizations doing the international rankings don't care about their accuracy - otherwise, they would have adjusted their rankings to compensate for the idiosyncrasies of German universities.
More precisely on (a), the unis care about rankings, but the politicians who'd have the power to change the structure of research don't. Indeed for the majority of German politicans, the word "elite" is toxic, even and especially in the context of having a few world-class centres of excellence rather than 50 merely adequate universities.
Global Uni rankings have a big bias toward research. What the poster is saying is that Germans do more of their research at these institutes than at their Universities so German Universities rate poorly on global lists.
As you can see, in Germany and France, research institutes take the place of what in the US and the UK would be universities like Harvard, MIT, Oxford, and Cambridge. Fraunhofer doesn't even show up, because while they do a lot of amazing stuff, they aren't under publish-or-perish constraints (they instead have contracts to fulfill) and so they publish comparatively little.
This has a number of reasons, some of which are pragmatic. For example, if a French or German university wants to hire a professor, that professor usually has to be able to speak French or German, respectively, at least at a near-native level to be an effective teacher (there are exceptions, but it's still a frequent requirement). Research institutes aren't constrained in this fashion, even though they closely interoperate with universities.
There are a lot of Frauenhofer's and the quality varies quite a bit (anecdotally, anything involving physical engineering is usually solid). They also tend to mass apply for all sorts of grants and build research proposals around trends. They are well connected and politically it's never a bad idea to have a Frauenhofer in your consortium if you apply for a national grant (imo).
I'm a bit torn on the overall concept since it seems zero-sum-ish and I'd rather see more research directly at the universities.
> I'm seeing more quality research from Fraunhofer in recent years that is also useful for practical purposes.
This is their intended mission. Only about 30% of Fraunhofer is financed through public funding, the remaining 70% or so have to be earned through doing contract work for the industry. This has a number of goals:
1. It makes advanced R&D accessible for small and medium enterprises that cannot afford their own R&D department.
2. It is a fairly effective way for the government to subsidize private R&D. It's effective, because businesses still have to pay the majority of the cost, so they aren't going to waste money.
3. Less research is hidden behind corporate walls, but can be more easily shared and reused, as Fraunhofer retains intellectual property to some of it (or even straight-out opens it up, such as GPI-2/GASPI [1]).
dunno this seems quite impractical. there's no suggestion on how to build such a sphere that big 700mt underwater and they kinda cheated using a freshwater basin because most of the turbine issues come from saltwater
