Give us your feedback Thank you for your feedback. Germany's Max Planck Society creates Nobel Prize winners. Most recently, in 2014, physicist Stefan Hell, one of its scholars, was recognised for a breakthrough in microscope technology, allowing much smaller structures -- less than 200 nanometres -- to be seen. Commercialising this kind of highbrow abstract research, however, has been a different matter. While the alumni of California's Stanford University have filled Silicon Valley with start-ups, Germany's research institutes have not created clusters on the same scale.

Germany's Max Planck Society creates Nobel Prize winners. Most recently, in 2014, physicist Stefan Hell, one of its scholars, was recognised for a breakthrough in microscope technology, allowing much smaller structures -- less than 200 nanometres -- to be seen. Commercialising this kind of highbrow abstract research, however, has been a different matter. While the alumni of California's Stanford University have filled Silicon Valley with start-ups, Germany's research institutes have not created clusters on the same scale. A new tech hub -- Cyber Valley -- in southern Germany between Stuttgart and Tübingen, is attempting to create new kinds of collaboration between academics and businesses.

Give us your feedback Thank you for your feedback. Germany's Max Planck Society creates Nobel Prize winners. Most recently, in 2014, physicist Stefan Hell, one of its scholars, was recognised for a breakthrough in microscope technology, allowing much smaller structures -- less than 200 nanometres -- to be seen. Commercialising this kind of highbrow abstract research, however, has been a different matter. While the alumni of California's Stanford University have filled Silicon Valley with start-ups, Germany's research institutes have not created clusters on the same scale.

Research analysts are the most likely employees on Wall Street to find themselves working with--or being replaced by--robots, according to a survey by Greenwich Associates. By next year, some 75% of banks and financial firms will either explore or implement artificial intelligence technologies, harnessing a variety of digital services to extract insights from mountains of data. While AI is probably near the peak of its hype cycle, several factors have helped it gain traction in recent years, according to Greenwich. Billions of images and documents are now available online for training computers to spot patterns and other high-level tasks. Advances in graphical processing units, which are adept at the kind of data crunching required by AI, are making sifting through daunting datasets much easier.