ABSTRACT
The “offensive strategy for technological change” had two main components: priorities for technological change and concentration in industry. The “offensive strategy” was an ambitious attempt by the centre to accelerate technological change and appears to have been borne of impatience with the instruments of the New Economic System; an impatience which first surfaced through comments of leading German Democratic Republic (GDR) politicians during 1967. Probably the techniques were viewed as an important source of Western, and especially West German, success in technological change, and since science could only develop unfettered in a socialist society, regarded as being potentially all the more effective in the GDR. “Fragmentation” of research and production had long been an issue for criticism in the GDR, and up to 1967 a certain amount of industrial concentration had taken place, both via enterprise fusion and the formation of Vereinigung Volkseigener Betriebe.
