Published on 30.10.2019 under News
Innovation success of German SMEs: coincidental, passive or not at all? - A look at a study on innovative milieus
Milieu: Often referred to is the social environment, but also red light or wound areas. And since the innovation worker’s favorite prefix makes every word sound nicer, there is now an innovation milieu. The matrix innovation team classifies the current study by IW Consult.
IW Consult identified seven “innovative milieus” in a current study commissioned by the Bertelsmann Foundation. From particularly successful and systematically innovative to non-innovative companies, the study defines these seven types of companies, each with similar innovation activities, and shows which levers companies use to achieve high innovation success [1] have to turn. The study covers around 1.000 companies [2] from the industry and service network and highlights innovation-relevant features such as innovation competence, innovation culture and internal and external networking.
Six percent of the companies are among the technology leaders
The so-called “technology leaders” emerged from the study as best in class: A small group (6%) of companies, primarily high-tech developers from the chemical, pharmaceutical, plastics or metal / electrical industries, with a strong focus on science, F + E, and continuous technological development.
The lower half of the scale is dominated [3] of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) - and according to the study, this group shows a rather low innovation success. According to this, the common characteristic of the three less successful milieus (“passive implementer”, “random innovator” and “company without innovation focus”) is an unstructured to non-pronounced innovation strategy.
How to… innovation success if we are not a technology leader?
Because we at matrix actually prefer to wear SME glasses, we want to see what we can derive, especially for small and medium-sized companies.
The largest group of innovation-successful companies are not the technology leaders, but the "disruptive" and "cooperative innovators". Young IT / tech companies and company-related service providers, which are characterized on the one hand by their openness to new ideas and the courage to undertake radical innovation projects. On the other hand, these companies cultivate a participatory and collaborative corporate culture that encourages and integrates all employees and promotes teamwork and interdisciplinary cooperation - values that are often ascribed to innovative startups and digital pioneers.
The essence of this - openness, participation and collaboration - can also be tailored to the individual needs of SMEs using, for example, open innovation, co-creation and digital product design, in order to develop products and services that meet an actual customer need and thus sustainably are successful in the market.
Promote innovation success:
- Openness to new things
- Participation / collaboration (internal and external)
- Networking with customers
- an embedded culture of innovation
If, in addition to developing tailor-made innovation strategies, we also support our customers in building up their internal skills, it is not only important for us that we pass on application-oriented and practical methods, but also that the company's internal innovation teams are ideally composed of heterogeneous structures - in order to use all the necessary resources and to establish a continuous innovation process that is supported by the whole team.
And then there is the link between highly innovative companies that overcome (technology, cooperation, innovation) boundaries and the less innovation-successful milieus: a small group of "conservative innovators" with medium innovation success. These also mostly large companies have a strong R&D orientation and corresponding IP, but rather unstructured innovation activities and no holistic innovation culture. Properties that they have in common with the less innovative companies. In addition, they tend to form knowledge silos and rigid hierarchies, which in turn prevents internal and external collaboration and networking.
Even a blind hen has market success
The “passive implementers” of the study do not carry out any innovation activities on their own and therefore have a lack of in-house innovation competence, but are stimulated from outside, by their customers, to new developments and improvements. The “random innovators” are relatively unstructured in their innovation activities and innovate more through “trial and error”. At the bottom of the list, companies with no innovation focus at all, consider innovations to be non-competitive. The authors of the study charmingly speak of an eternal cycle of not wanting and not being able to innovate.
Obstacles to success:
- Unstructured innovation activities
- Unclear or no innovation strategy
- lack of in-house innovation competence
And? Which milieu do you belong to?
In our day-to-day consulting work, we experience that medium-sized companies and SMEs secure their future viability from their very intrinsic strengths. These include openness to new technologies, good networking with your customers (the foundation for successful co-creation, ie development close to the customer), navigation in a tense competitive environment and a good view of competition and market position. Building on the core competencies of a company, innovation-promoting factors can then be well strengthened - for example through the introduction of systematic innovation management, application-oriented innovation management training, the development of a user-friendly innovation strategy or opening up not only to new technologies, but also to new forms of cooperation - with customers, startups, research or other companies.
Incidentally, the authors of the study also present Recommendations for business the different milieus, which were developed in a design thinking workshop with innovation experts from the IW Consult, Bertelsmann Stiftung and Fraunhofer ISI, among others.
If you are wondering whether this is also possible individually for your company - just give us a call. We not only like to wear our customers' glasses, but also like to talk to them.
For everyone who likes it digital: We also have e-mail and a digital one Innovation ability check with individual evaluation.
Contact person
dr Anna Czeschik
T: 0211-75707-48
innovationsberatung@matrix-gmbh.de
[1] "Innovative output" in the form of introduced product, organizational and marketing innovations
[2] 867 SMEs, 123 larger companies, 109 startups (younger than 10 years)
[3] to 98,8%
