KAS-Fellowship 2024

Lars Zimmermann, KAS Fellow 2024

Each year, the KAS Fellowship integrates an important person and their external perspective into our foundation’s work.

Integration into the Foundation’s Work

The Fellowship of the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung, in short KAS-Fellowship, aims at involving a person of the public with their view from the outside into the work of the foundation. The selection of experts for the Fellowship is motivated interdisciplinarily and with the intention of influencing the tasks and aims of the foundation’s projects by future-oriented, but also by admonishing voices of the society. Self-critical reflection is essential in order to do justice to our core work, the political education. To take up social change as an element of our own development is at the same time the mission and the challenge of the KAS Fellowship. In their role as KAS-Fellow, the sociologist Armin Nassehi (KAS Fellow 2021), the diplomat and security expert Christoph Heusgen (KAS Fellow 2022) and the marine researcher Antje Boetius (KAS Fellow 2023) were followed by digital and technology expert Lars Zimmermann, starting January 2024.

KAS Fellow 2024: Lars Zimmermann

Lars Zimmermann is co-founder and board member of GovTech Campus Deutschland e.V., the world's first innovation, development and learning space for the modernization of government and administration. The federal government and the federal states are driving the Campus forward as a joint platform with the aim of developing digital innovations and technologies for the federal, state, and local governments together with the tech scene and making them available for reuse. Before founding the GovTech Campus, Lars Zimmermann worked in various founding and management positions in technology and transformation consulting and was founder and spokesman of the board of the Stiftung neue Verantwortung. Lars Zimmermann has been involved in the areas of state modernization and administrative reform for many years and has developed, initiated and implemented a large number of measures and projects in this area. As one of Germany's most innovative minds at the interface of technology, politics and social change, he supported Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung in 2024 with new ideas and concepts, particularly in the areas of digitalization and administration. For Lars Zimmermann, the organization of a state is the basic prerequisite for its efficiency. Bureaucracy and administration must function, otherwise democracy will not work either. Political education plays an important role here. For Zimmermann, the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung was therefore an ideal partner for ideas and experimentation. Together with the many KAS colleagues in Germany and abroad, he will developed ideas and projects in 2024 that can be used to make governance structures more modern, resilient and open to technology.