Business and Innovation Center Lippe-Detmold (GILDE)

GILDE is the agency for economic-development in Detmold, Germany. We are a public-private-partnership-company and our owners are the Municipality of Detmold (63 % of the shares), the regional Savings Bank and the regional Chamber of Industry and Commerce. Detmold (75.000 inh., capital of the region Lippe) is situated in the northern part of Northrhine-Westphalia, called Lippe/Eastwestphalia-Lippe („OWL“) with very strong SMEs and competences in Industry 4.0 / IoT etc. 

GILDE is responsible for a huge spectrum of economic development activities in our region e.g. supporting SMEs in fields of management, innovation, communication, vocational training, risk prevention etc. Furthermore we are managing the GILDE-Centre which is an innovation-center (incubator) for more than 50 small and medium sized companies and especially business-starters. 

In the last 25 years we organized and participated at several national and international projects, e.g. an Interreg-Project "CLIQ" focussed on Quadruple Helix or "FutureEcom" focussed on digitaization among SMEs. Our „speciality“ is CSR Corporate Social Responsibility: In this context we organised several projects and created a „Competence Center“ (funded by the Federal State) with the mission to bring CSR as a sustainable business strategy into SMEs.