‍“Berlin has always been a city of reinvention… a playground for startups, artists, and visionaries who dare to rethink what’s possible.”

On October 9, 2025, Venture Café Berlin celebrated its 1st birthday at CIC Berlin, one of those nights where the room feels like a real cross-section of the city: founders, investors, public sector, corporates, researchers, community builders.

To mark the anniversary, we hosted a special Unboxing The Future live edition: “Unboxing the Future of Berlin’s Innovation Ecosystem.”

What we unboxed that night was a very real tension:

Berlin’s edge has never been “polish.” It’s been a culture of access: the feeling that you can get in the room, start conversations fast, and move without too much hierarchy. In Berlin, access often beats status: who you are matters less than what you’re building and whether you show up.

But success changes a city.

As Berlin attracts more funding, more institutions, and more attention, it risks trading that access culture for something safer: hierarchy, bureaucracy, and innovation that looks good on paper but feels dead in real life.

So the question we put on the table was simple:

Can Berlin scale without loosing its unique identity?

The voices in the room

To unbox that question properly, we brought together people who experience Berlin’s ecosystem from very different angles:

• Ewa Geresz (Interim Director, Venture Café Berlin) — building the connective tissue that turns “we should meet sometime” into “let’s make this happen.”
• Norbert Herrmann (Head of Startup Affairs, Senate Department for Economics, Energy and Public Enterprises) — bringing the public-sector lens on what helps companies start, survive, and scale in Berlin.
• Jannis Gilde (Projektleiter Research, Startup-Verband) — adding research-driven perspective on how the ecosystem performs and where it gets stuck.
• Maren Lesche (Founder & CEO, Startup Colors) — keeping the conversation honest about visibility, access, and who gets to be “the face” of innovation.
• Cephas Ndubueze (Founder, FOMO Berlin) — representing the community-builder reality: momentum comes from people showing up.

Unboxing The Future of Berlin's Innovation Ecosystem

We used the session to map Berlin’s next phase through the real experiences of people trying to hire, raise, sell, and grow in the city.

1) Access vs. gatekeeping

Berlin’s culture of access is real and fragile. The more a city grows, the more “rooms” become exclusive by default: closed networks, private intros, invite-only circles. The question was how to grow without turning connection into a privilege.

2) Community vs. coordination

Berlin has no shortage of events, initiatives, and good intentions. The harder part is coordination: clear handoffs, shared priorities, and fewer parallel worlds. In other words: less “we should collaborate sometime,” more “here’s the next step.”

3) Creative edge vs. institutional gravity

Berlin’s innovation has always been cross-pollination: culture + tech, research + street, impact + business. But as more institutions and funding arrive, the center of gravity can shift toward “safe” innovation — polished, predictable, easier to measure — and less alive.

4) International magnetism vs. staying power

Berlin attracts talent fast. The real test is whether the ecosystem helps people stay, build, and scale, without burning out or getting lost in complexity.

What did we learned?

Berlin’s uniqueness is its "cross-pollination", research meets street reality, impact meets business.

It’s built through repeated collisions, low hierarchy, and people who actively connect worlds that don’t naturally overlap. If that infrastructure weakens, the city doesn’t just lose “cool.” It loses its compounding advantage: the speed at which trust and collaboration form.

So scaling without losing identity is about protecting the conditions that make building here feel possible.

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