Introduction
Stolen from:[https://www.die-wirtschaftsinitiative.de/zukunft/zahlen-und-fakten.html] Today, the Rhine-Main region is one of the strongest economic regions in Germany and Europe. Politically, economically and culturally, it is primarily characterized by the financial metropolis of Frankfurt am Main, the science city of Darmstadt, Offenbach, which is characterized by industry, and Wiesbaden, the capital of the state of Hesse. The development of the region into a significant industrial location began around the middle of the 19th century. While the importance of commercial and industrial production steadily declined in the 1980s, the tertiary sector of the economy experienced an upswing. In the course of the worldwide interconnection of (capital) markets, the Rhine-Main region increasingly developed into a European hub and distribution point in international trade. Around 5.5 million people live and work in FrankfurtRhineMain today. More than twice as many trade fair visitors and tourists visit each year. More than 400,000 companies keep the economic engine of the metropolitan region running, 2.2 million employees go about their daily work, and every twelfth euro of Germany’s gross value added is earned here. Measured by the purchasing power index, economic power in FrankfurtRhineMain is 9.2 percent above the national average. Thanks to a very diverse industry and cluster structure, Frankfurt and the Rhine-Main region are among the strongest economic areas in Germany and Europe. And: The world’s digital threads come together in the world’s largest Internet hub. Anyone googling in New York or Dubai can be sure: The data flows through Frankfurt.
As a central hub for data, FrankfurtRhineMain also has the potential to play a leading role in future digital and data-based economies. One would assume that where data flows, there are also numerous companies that evaluate data using state-of-the-art methods and derive new business models from it. Unfortunately, this is not the case. The digital relevance of Frankfurt and the Rhine-Main region has unfortunately continued to decline in recent years. Regions such as Munich, Berlin or Hamburg have built strong innovation ecosystems in recent years, generating a large number of new, disruptive digital companies, products and services. This is especially true for deep tech, startups and companies that use cutting-edge technologies in their products and services – including, in particular, the future technology of artificial intelligence.
