The Foundation

About our founder, his vision, the foundation's mission, and the people he entrusted with fulfilling it.

“Mister HARIBO” is what the children in the kindergarten close to his place of work often called Dr. Hans Riegel when he stopped by to bring them new candy. Dr. Hans Riegel was a co-owner of HARIBO and passed away in 2013. His love for children and young people motivated him to create his nonprofit foundations in Germany and Austria with the aim of giving back to society some of the happiness he himself had experienced.

From the beginning, he knew that the foundations were to stand for excellent ideas in school education and professional education. Young people were to be supported and assisted.

He considered education to be the raw material that makes up the prosperity of highly developed societies. To him, it was especially important that his foundations helped talented and creative students choose scientific and technical professions.

He began launching projects with the foundation back in 2007 with the Dr. Hans Riegel Awards (Dr. Hans Riegel Fachpreise) and the resulting alumni network to provide educational support and promote talents in the scientific and technical fields. In the foundation's charter as well as in numerous conversations, he established that the foundation was to pursue and anticipate the transformation of society like an entrepreneur. The realization of the foundation's own projects in collaboration with competent partners was to make up the essence of its work.

Our projects aim to awaken and sustainably cultivate the interest and curiosity in young people from kindergarten all the way to university to explore the natural sciences and engineering. We want to preserve the innate curiosity of children and show them through our work how they can be a part of this exciting world and become successful in their studies and careers.

Learn more on the following pages:

Mission

Founder

History

People

Curiosity is always the first step to resolving a problem.

Galileo Galilei

Amazement is where all research starts. All of a sudden, you notice something.

Wolfgang Wickler

All education begins with curiosity.

Peter Bieri

Education in the twentieth century first and foremost requires instinctive defense against a surplus of information.

Hans Kasper

Education is what remains once the things you‘d learned have been forgotten.

Edward Frederick Lindley Wood

Education is a crutch with which the foolish attack the wise to prove that they are not idiots.

Karl Kraus

Hunger for education and thirst for knowledge are not fattening.

Lothar Schmidt

Bitter are the roots of study, but how sweet their fruit.

Marcus Porcius Cato

The searcher's eye not seldom finds more than he wished to find.

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing

Let the scholar forget what he has done as soon as it is done, and always think only of what he has yet to do.

Johann Gottlieb Fichte

The teacher holds the raw material for our country in his hand.

Matthias Platzeck

Education is getting smaller every day because haste is getting bigger.

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.

Benjamin Franklin

First doubt, then inquire, then discover!

Henry Thomas Buckle

Research is always the continuation of research where others have left off, the continuation of building on foundations and scaffolding that others have prepared, and thus, unfortunately, at the same time the continuation on wrong paths that others have taken.

Hubert S. Markl

Educated is the one who sees parallels where others see something completely new.

Anton Graff

Scholars are people who differ from ordinary mortals by the acquired ability to delight in rambling and intricate fallacies.

Anatole France

Anyone can squash a bug but all professors of this world couldn't build one.

Arthur Schopenhauer

Speed is necessary to catch fleas, but not to write books.

Michail A. Scholochow

Once we are destined to live out our lives in the prison of our mind, our duty is to furnish it well.

Sir Peter Ustinov

Those who save on young people will become impoverished in the future.

Adolf Haslinger

If you have nothing in the ground, you have to have something in your head.

Wolfgang Bosbach

Anyone who conducts an argument by appealing to authority is not using his intelligence; he is just using his memory.

Leonardo da Vinci

Knowledge is the only instrument of production that is not subject to diminishing returns.

John Maurice Clark

Any teaching, if it is to be a system, i.e. a whole of knowledge ordered according to principles, is called science.

Immanuel Kant

Money is round and rolls away, but education remains.

Heinrich Heine

In times of rapid economic and technological change, education, training and continuing education are key.

Richard Freiherr von Weizsäcker

Without speculation there is no good and original observation.

Charles Darwin

A child is a fire to be lit, not a vase to be filled.

Francois Rabelais