Vantaggi
this is a great place to get to know the landscape of independent research institutes and to get to know a lot of players in Europe / Germany / USA. you do get quite a bit of freedom to go your own way if you can succeed / get financed, so this is a great place if you want to try out a topic they also encourage academic and non-academic publishing and they let you go out into the world and speak, right from the start
Svantaggi
the institute as a whole is rather shallow, intellectually there is very little contribution to current debates in policy or theory there is no theoretical foundation or core values to speak off the institute follows the money and is very driven by the market there is very little programmatic work beyond implementing projects diversity is very weak, in every regard