Economy on innovative course?
The German economy goes out of its defense and plays its strengths: more than 80 % of all enterprises increased their investments into innovative projects during the last three years. However the innovative strategies are mostly focused on the manufacturing processes. The thinking that the manufacturing process can be more efficient is deep engrained.  Activities to develop or innovate business models and product & services however are not on the map. But still the majority of companies wants to increase their expenses in Research and Development.

However strong activities in Innovation don`t guarantee new business opportunities and profitable growth. Also ingenious ideas, great inventions or patents are not sufficient, in order to keep up internationally. Particularly in matured and declining markets, where German companies are active, it might happen that the innovative pipeline runs dry: The pressure to secure the economic success for the upcoming years with new products, processes and businesses are here particularly strong. The efford to answer this pressure with appropriate innovative activities however is rather small. There are too few innovations and inventions in Germany.

Companies are still concentrating on “Lean Activities” in the manufactoring process to keep the costs in the grasp. In other words they pursue a defensive strategy. In addition most impulses are coming out of their own rows like: Management, coworker and customer. The Innovation Leaders are rather focused on external know-how. An Innovative Culture with an “Outside-in Process” is essetial for those companies.  And that is the way how ideas become alive. Developments and inventions are the basic condition and essential for future market growth and to become the market leader.
In their innovative activities the majority of companies want to focus mainly at customers and competitors. Sounds good but does it really help to come up with something new? Because too often this means that new product adaptions and new production technologies are simply imitated. Top Innovators however are active within Networks & Clusters. An additional outcome is to benefit from public support for innovations as a result of these networking activities. Innovation follower don`t have this advantage since they are not working that often in Networks. Therefore they have no access to subsidieses.

Tags: Business Opportunity, Networking, Process Innovation, profitable growth

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 31st, 2009 at 10:36 and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.