I mean, Fraunhofer is a major German research org and it should be in their business to promote such solutions. To fire something like this out, in front of the people who definitely attended those universities, that was shocking.
To this day I don’t know if I was simply naive or if my question was stupid in any way.
It sounds like you were in a meeting discussing how to set up a separate organization and your suggestion was to give the work to people who are doing a poor job already and then you are hoping that they'll suddenly stop failing if you give them access to private company details, work projects, even research. I think the mindset in these parts of Europe is that the companies are where you do real work and anyone who is actually good will find their way into a company anyway. Everyone who attends these universities knows that they are bad, it would not be a shock. They are there not because of the university but because of their own work ethic.
By and large, the 'best' research institutes in Germany are not the universities, but Max Planck and institutes like Fraunhofer. They may be loosely affiliated with the universities, but the University faculty and the research faculty are not one and the same. Students getting a doctorate may have that doctorate minted by the affiliated university, but all real work actually happens at the research institute.
Students can get doctorates directly from German universities and research is done there, but it's just not organized like American universities. Prime prestige centers are research institutes and they're spread around the country.
I mean, Fraunhofer is a major German research org and it should be in their business to promote such solutions. To fire something like this out, in front of the people who definitely attended those universities, that was shocking.
To this day I don’t know if I was simply naive or if my question was stupid in any way.