HANNOVER, Germany — The sales literature is slick; the financial controllers tenacious; the individual projects live and die by their profitability. As a result, income has risen faster than at Siemens, DaimlerChryler, Lufthansa or SAP in the past five years.

All of the essential ingredients one might expect of a successful German enterprise that set a global standard: MP3, the digital audio compression format on 150 million music players and almost every computer in the world.

But the organization that created the MP3 and is awarded about 500 patents per year is not a company but a state-financed, nonprofit group: the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, a network of 58 institutes in Germany, one of more than 6,000 exhibitors at Cebit, the technology trade shownin Hannover, this year.

"At Fraunhofer, most of our research has to find an immediate application in industry or it doesn't work," said Hans-Jörg Bullinger, president of the institutes since 2002. "What's unusual is that we run things like a business, and businesses, as you know, have to make a profit."