Across the divide between academic knowledge and industrial need, a quiet structural failure persists: not a shortage of expertise or willingness, but a failure of connection. Researchers at IfM Bonn have examined why small and medium-sized businesses so rarely find their way to the university labs that could help them, and their answer points not to individual shortcomings but to missing infrastructure. Regional networks — coordinating universities, trade associations, and financial intermediaries — may be the connective tissue that transforms mutual benefit from potential into practice.