Thai-German Innovation Roundtable 2025: A Collaborative Pathway Toward Sustainable Innovation

The Thai–German Innovation Roundtable 2025, held on 22 August 2025, marked an important milestone in strengthening bilateral collaboration on innovation, sustainable development, and technology-driven growth. The event brought together innovation leaders, public agencies, research organizations, and industry partners from both countries to explore future pathways for cooperation. The Roundtable acted as a platform to turn dialogue into tangible cooperation, connect innovation ecosystems, and accelerate bilateral technology development.

Setting the Foundations for Bilateral Innovation

The Roundtable opened with welcoming remarks from Mr.KrongSak Songraksa, the Deputy Director General of Thailand's Department of Agricultural Extension, and Mr.Stephan Framke from Germany's Federal Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Identity. The remarks highlighted the growing importance of global innovation partnerships, especially between countries with complementary strengths like Thailand and Germany.

Thailand’s rapid transformation under policies such as Thailand 4.0 has created new opportunities for advanced manufacturing, digitalization, agritech, and sustainable technologies. Meanwhile, Germany continues to lead in engineering, applied sciences, and global innovation capabilities. The Roundtable’s purpose was not only to exchange insights but to ignite co-creation, a key value of the GETHAC Project initiative. This Roundtable was designed as an interactive platform where participants from both Thai and German sides were able to actively share opinions and discuss how future cooperation on innovations between the two countries could look like.

The Thai–German Innovation Roundtable exemplifies the strategic mission of GETHAC Project in terms of innovations and partner networks building:

• Connecting innovation ecosystems

• Facilitating co-creation between agencies and research institutions

• Strengthening SME innovation

• Supporting sector-specific transformation (especially agriculture and sustainability)

• Promoting people-to-people and knowledge exchange

The Roundtable this year was part of a broader continuum of innovation cooperation with expectations to advance the ideas generated in each session, develop joint proposals for research and innovation projects, strengthen SME-focused support programs, prepare sector-specific events and innovation demonstrations, and continue building networks among Thai and German innovation actors.