Ruhr universities shine in the 2025 start-up radar – a successful rise!

Ruhr universities shine in the 2025 start-up radar – a successful rise!

The University Alliance Ruhr (UA Ruhr) is a pioneer in supporting start-ups, as the report just published Start-up radar 2025 of the donor association. The TU Dortmund and the Ruhr University Bochum (RUB) are among the ten strongest large universities in Germany. This encouraging development was presented on March 3rd, and the results reflect the universities' consistent strategy to strengthen the start-up culture in the region.

In the current ranking, TU Dortmund is in 8th place out of 48 major universities, a notable rise from 13th place in 2022. RUB was able to improve from 9th place to 6th, while the University of Duisburg-Essen (UDE) rose 18 places to 20th place. A total of 227 universities took part in the survey, which underlines the competitiveness and performance of the UA Ruhr.

Focus on start-up funding

The university management at UA Ruhr is satisfied with the results and sees them as confirmation of their strategy to promote business start-ups. The UA Ruhr is also applying in the Startup Factories lighthouse competition and has qualified as one of the best 15 associations nationwide. The founding partners include the RAG Foundation, the Initiativkreis Ruhr and the BRYCK start-up initiative.

In its role as founding partner, the RAG Foundation is investing up to ten million euros in the Startup Factory RUHR, which has the destiny to become a leading European forge for international tech start-ups. This initiative benefits from the highest student density and the densest science network in Germany, which makes the Ruhr area particularly attractive for founders.

Successful start-up centers in the Ruhr area

The UA Ruhr has launched several successful start-up centers, including the Center for Entrepreneurship & Transfer (CET) at the TU Dortmund, the Worldfactory Start-up Center (WSC) at the RUB and GUIDE, the center for start-ups and innopreneurship at the UDE. These institutions have been funded since 2019 and 2020 and are helping to ensure that the number of start-ups and the number of people working to support start-ups at universities in Germany continues to rise.

• Dortmund: Centrum für Entrepreneurship & Transfer (CET)
• Bochum: Worldfactory Start-up Center (WSC)
• Duisburg/Essen: GUIDE, Zentrum für Gründungen und Innopreneurship

The start-up radar has been created since 2012, supported by the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Protection, with the aim of continually improving start-up support at universities. In 2023, 2,927 supervised start-ups were registered at German universities, which shows that the number of start-ups with knowledge and technology transfer accounts for more than a third of the total. The proportion of patent-based start-ups has also increased significantly compared to 2012.

By founding UA Ruhr Transfer GmbH, the UA Ruhr has taken a further step to strengthen the university association and ensure the long-term visibility of successful start-up programs. The Start-up Radar 2025 highlights the need to consolidate funding structures so that temporary programs can be transformed into long-term, sustainable structures.