Autor: Hans Koller

Demographic change, skills shortages, and stagnating productivity are threatening the competitiveness of German industry. At the same time, AI and digital assistance systems are opening up new opportunities: they make work more efficient and support skilled workers. But while they have long been part of everyday life, their potential in industry remains largely untapped—this is where this issue comes in with innovative concepts.

Today, the increasing pace of development makes the task of Business Intelligence urgent and difficult at the same time. However, companies being pressurized by their day to day affairs do not feel up to facing this task themselves. Especially in small and medium enterprises an effective solution is needed to make sure that they see changes approaching before they are overtaken by them, so that they can react quickly and competently. With this need in mind, the present paper focuses on changes brought about by technological innovations and offers a solution which has been developed in a project involving a company engaged in medical engineering. The core element of the developed proposal is the decentralization of foresight. Therefore information is being gathered, passed upwards and thereby evaluated by a hierarchy of managers, called “radar groups”. Such perspective allows essential feedback to the capabilities of a company on all levels. In sum this leads to a new thesis ...

With regard to the current competitive environment companies, and especially small and medium sized companies, ought to combine their competencies through the formation of strategic networks. This bundling permits the organizations to realize economies of scale, offer combined services and generate innovations. But especially innovation networks make great demands on network management. Based on the framework taken out of the manual “Managing Innovation Networks” by the VDI this article therefore outlines the particular management functions for innovation networks and reviews related literature. The purpose of this analysis is to point out suggestions for the management of innovation networks and to give an overview of research findings.