About us
Since 2001, BioRegio STERN Management GmbH has been promoting economic development in the life sciences, helping to strengthen the region and the industry as a whole by supporting innovations and start-up companies as a public service. It is a central point of contact for founders and entrepreneurs, including those from cooperating high-tech sectors such as automation and IT.
The STERN BioRegion covers the regions of Stuttgart and Neckar-Alb and the cities of Tübingen and Reutlingen – known worldwide for their car manufacturers – and is also home to 120 small and medium-sized medtech companies. One of the cluster’s key features is its combination of established family businesses, hidden champions and over 110 fledgling biotech companies. Another factor that makes the cluster so outstanding and cutting-edge is the close proximity of engineering-driven SMEs and companies from the life sciences sector. Consequently, BioRegio STERN Management GmbH’s strategy is to bring its life sciences cluster into contact with local automation technology and mechanical and plant engineering with the aim of creating an extraordinary mix of high-tech expertise across start-ups and global corporations.
The region’s economic prosperity is perfectly complemented by the scientific excellence of numerous renowned research institutes and three universities. The companies in the STERN BioRegion benefit from the large number of scientific institutions conducting research in the field of life sciences. These include, to name just a few, the University of Tübingen, the Tübingen University Hospital, the NMI Natural and Medical Sciences Institute at the University of Tübingen based in Reutlingen, the Universities of Stuttgart and Hohenheim, eight other universities with a focus on the life sciences, the Fraunhofer Institutes for Manufacturing Engineering and Automation (IPA) and for Interfacial Engineering and Biotechnology (IGB) and the German Institutes of Textile and Fiber Research (DITF) Denkendorf. Others include the Max Planck Institutes for Intelligent Systems, Developmental Biology and Biological Cybernetics along with the Friedrich Miescher Laboratory of the Max Planck Society.
BioRegio STERN Management GmbH is committed to supporting efforts to market application-oriented research in order to turn innovative products and new therapies into part of people’s everyday lives – while, of course, also focusing on the economic potential, which ultimately leads to the creation of new jobs. For this reason, BioRegio STERN Management GmbH drives forward the establishment of new start-ups and collaborations, offers support when it comes to financing and soliciting funding, and organizes events such as special coaching on product approval and specialist functions. It also submits applications for research projects, which it then coordinates.
BioRegio STERN Management GmbH has already won many awards, for instance the Silver Label from the European Secretariat for Cluster Analysis (ESCA) for its success in cluster management. In 2016, the joint initiative between politics and business “Germany – Land of Ideas” selected the business network “ELSA – automation solutions for biosciences” as one of the 100 best projects, making the STERN BioRegion an official “Landmark in the Land of Ideas”.