Miscellaneous  |  05/23/2025

TransforM Receives Funding as a Cluster of Excellence

On 22 May 2025, it was announced that the Munich Center for Transformative Technologies and Societal Changes (TransforM) will be funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) over the next seven years as one of 70 Clusters of Excellence as part of the Excellence Strategy of the German Federal and State Governments. The Institute is a part of the Cluster of Excellence, Dietmar Harhoff was a co-applicant.

Logo of the cluster of excellence TransforM, showing an abstracted butterfly.
Logo of the cluster of excellence TransforM, showing an abstracted butterfly.

TransforM aims to advance social science​ for highly technologized societies​ to better understand and shape​ the transformative power ​of technology​. The goal is to better understand why, when, and how technologies become socially transformative, and to critically assess and inform transformation pathways ‘all the way through’ – from the early stages of their emergence to their wider socio-economic impact.


The application was submitted by the Technical University of Munich (TUM). Other participating institutions are the ZEW – Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research, and at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, the Institute for Leadership and Organization with Prof. Martin Högl and the ifo Center for the Economics of Innovation and Digital Transformation with Prof. Oliver Falk. Cooperation partners are Bayern Innovativ, the Bavarian Research Institute for Digital Transformation - bidt, DEEP Ecosystems, the Deutsches Museum, the Institute for Employment Research (IAB) and UnternehmerTUM.


TransforM tackles the dual challenge of advancing fundamental social science for technologized societies and rethinking technology development through a social science lens head on. As an interdisciplinary social science cluster with a principal focus on technology, it is to augment current theories and methods to comprehensively understand and help shape transformative technology to better serve diverse societal needs..


More information: https://transform-cluster.de/