“No other part of Saxony has this spirit”

When presenter Dirk Vogel asked, at the Saxon Business Summer Meeting on 12 June 2025 in the television studio at Mittweida University of Applied Sciences, why cooperation between business, local authorities and the university works so well in this university town, and what advice local stakeholders might give to other university towns, the conversation faltered briefly. Give advice to others? “I don’t want to talk about the other locations at all,” said Professor Volker Tolkmitt, Rector of Mittweida University of Applied Sciences. “If the other locations do things in a similar way to us and achieve similar success, then we would have to consider what the next logical step would be – and that is exactly what we do every day.”

Identifying potential, boldly putting ideas to the test and turning them into success. Perhaps this is how one might sum up the ‘Mittweida spirit’ that the 360 participants at the Saxon Business Summer Gathering in Mittweida were keen to experience. To mark the event’s tenth anniversary, the organisers – RKW Sachsen, Industrieverein Sachsen and VEMAS – specifically chose this town in Central Saxony to bring together the Free State’s business elite under the theme ‘Modernity meets nature – innovation meets industry’.

After the panel discussion, the Saxon managers were able to see exactly how this works at first hand. In addition to the Laser Institute at Mittweida University of Applied Sciences, the Centre for Media and Social Work and successful local businesses, they visited the Telewerk real-world laboratory on the premises of Werkbank 32, the innovation and start-up centre run by Volksbank Mittweida. Mittweida University of Applied Sciences and Fraunhofer IVI, supported by the then Ministry for Regional Development, added two extraordinary buildings to the site: Telewerk and Amsel. There, the partners are jointly developing and testing new ways of working and living, characterised by short distances within modern buildings with a minimal carbon footprint, as well as state-of-the-art infrastructure for cyber security and energy management.