Since 1971, it has been legally independent and organized in the form of a GmbH, which was formerly supported and financed in equal parts by the Max Planck Society and the Steel Institute VDEh.

The long-term institutional co-sponsoring by Steel Institute VDEh determined a unique example of a public private partnership for both the Max Planck Society and European industry and was intended to ensure a close link between knowledge-oriented and pre-competitive basic research on the one hand and commercial relevance on the other.

After the VDEh had reduced its annual subsidies since 2016 due to structural problems in the steel industry and completely terminated the financing agreement in October 2019 with effect from 31 December 2021, it transferred all shares to the Max Planck Society in March 2020, making it the sole shareholder.

The Institute plays a central role in enabling progress in the fields of mobility (e.g. steels and soft magnets for light-weight hybrid vehicles and Ni-base alloys for plane turbines), energy (e.g. efficiency of thermal power conversion through better high temperature alloys and nanostructured solar cells), infrastructure (e.g. steels for large infrastructures, e.g. wind turbines and chemical plants), and safety (e.g. nanostructured bainitic steels for gas pipelines).

The six main cross-disciplinary topics are: In many of these areas the Institute holds a position of international scientific leadership, particularly in multiscale materials modeling, surface science, metallurgical alloy design, and advanced structure characterization from atomic to macroscopic scales of complex engineering and functional materials.