Creative Bureaucracy Festival

What happens here

The Creative Bureaucracy Festival brings together every year in Berlin those who prefer to shape the public sector rather than manage it. The festival originated in 2018 as an offshoot of the Falling Walls program and has developed into the largest international conference on administrative innovation in just a few years. In 2025, over 2,100 participants attended in person, plus more than 2,000 via livestream – record numbers.

The 9th Edition on June 11, 2026

Date: June 11, 2026. Venue: Festsaal Kreuzberg, Am Flutgraben 2, Treptow-Köpenick district, Alt-Treptow neighborhood. Doors open at 8:00 AM, program from 9:00 AM to 7:00 PM, evening program afterwards. Several stages and workshop rooms, around 90 parallel sessions, over 200 speakers from at least 30 countries.

Topics 2026

The program focuses for 2026 were announced by the Falling Walls Foundation in the areas of Artificial Intelligence in public administration, migration and integration, institutional resilience, defense and security, and cities as innovation labs. The final session list with speaker profiles will be published from spring 2026 on creativebureaucracy.org.

Who attends

The audience is diverse – administrative employees from federal, state, and municipal authorities, program managers from foundations, politics, business, science, activism, the tech world. The digital Impact Stage can be followed free of charge via livestream, making the festival internationally accessible.

Berlin Context

Berlin as the venue is no coincidence: The capital, with its chronic administrative problems, is the ideal laboratory for the discourse on how public institutions could function better. Berlin, State of Berlin.