Cooperation Partners

From 2014 on, KfW/ZEW's Start-Up Panel has been continued as IAB/ZEW Start-Up Panel.

The success of the project will be assured not only due to its highly developed concept, but also due to the specific skills of the three cooperation partners Creditreform, KfW and ZEW. ZEW - one of the leading German economic research institutes - has an outstanding know-how in the investigation, preparation and evaluation of firm data, especially with respect to data on firm foundations. Creditreform - the largest German credit rating agency - is able to investigate actual firm data from manifold sources and thus to provide a basis for the samples of the foundation panel. Moreover, Creditreform ensures the availability of up-to-date information on the survival status of the firms. An important synergy effect consists in the fact that ZEW and Creditreform have already been cooperating for many years on the field of firm data, thus ensuring an uncomplicated generation of data bases that are used by the market research institute to conduct the telephone interviews. The KfW, due to the many years of maintaining the survey data sets “KfW Start-up Monitor” and “KfW SME Panel” and the continuous evaluation of these data, has acquired a high know-how in the field of foundation and SME research.

The survey data is transferred to Creditreform and the KfW by the ZEW, which coordinates the collection and preparation of the data, in a formally anonymous way according to project partner’s data protection concept. The data can be used only within the scope of scientific projects. A combination with other data sets which are in possession of the KfW or Creditreform is excluded.