Fraunhofer-Institut für Produktionsanlagen und Konstruktionstechnik IPK

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Publication

Patterns for Resilient Value Creation: Perspective of the German Electrical Industry during the COVID-19 Pandemic

2021 , Neumann, Konstantin , Erp, Tim van , Steinhöfel, Erik , Sieckmann, Felix , Kohl, Holger

The COVID-19 pandemic represents a massive, often unanticipated, external disruption for many companies. As a concept for responding to such disruption, organizational resilience has recently received great attention. In the organizational context, the overriding question is how companies can become more resilient. This study aims to contribute to answering this question by identifying, categorizing, and providing specific business model patterns for achieving resilience on the corporate level. For this purpose, a review of publications by major consulting firms was conducted. Patterns were extracted from publications until a convergence criterion indicated that no new pattern could be identified considering further publications. The 110 extracted unique patterns were clustered into 13 objectives, and additionally categorized according to resilience phases, as well as business model elements, to support the application in practice. The final catalog of patterns was validated through expert interviews and thus provides organizations, such as those in the electrical industry, with an overview and specific approaches on how to tackle industrial resilience through the adaption of their business model.

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Publication

Business model innovation: A comparative analysis

2016 , Steinhöfel, Erik , Kohl, Holger , Orth, Ronald

In the past, companies often maintained a business model (BM) for long periods. Today, this is no longer possible as changes in the business environment such as inter-industry competition, shifting patterns of demand, new products, production or distribution technologies erode the power of established BMs. As a consequence, companies are forced to systematically manage or reinvent their BMs and become able at doing so. Although companies believe that the management and innovation of BMs can significantly contribute to business success they are often not able to realize such transformation due to a lack of required abilities and knowledge as well as suited processes and mechanisms to support them. Against this background, the focus of this contribution is on current approaches and procedure for managing and innovating BMs. Based on a literature review within the BM discipline and further associated disciplines BMI approaches have been identified and are described, analysed and compared regarding a practical application. Thus, giving the reader an overview of current comprehensive approaches and thereby establishing a basis for further research and development is the aim of this paper.

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Publication

Sustainability Reporting in German Manufacturing SMEs

2019 , Steinhöfel, Erik , Galeitzke, Mila , Kohl, Holger , Orth, Ronald

This paper investigates how small and medium-sized enterprises from the German manufacturing sector address sustainability issues through the implementation of sustainability reporting. For this purpose, 14 sustainability reports were analyzed with regard to the extent that they apply the framework provided by the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), as well as the differences between companies that apply the GRI framework and companies that do not. In addition, indicators and related units that are used to report sustainability are investigated. The findings of this contribution show that there is a general lack of consistency among the considered sustainability reports, which demands for further harmonization of sustainability reporting in order to ensure comparability of sustainability performance across different organizations.

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Publication

A practical approach to process-oriented knowledge management

2015 , Kohl, Holger , Orth, Ronald , Steinhöfel, Erik

Due to global competition and increasingly dynamic markets, the importance of intangible resources such as knowledge has been growing dramatically, especially for small and medium-sized enterprises (SME). SMEs have to be more innovative, flexible, and efficient to successfully cope with typical challenges such as growing competition and rapidly changing demand patterns. In the past, knowledge management has been successfully implemented and developed by large enterprises in particular. In contrast, knowledge management for SME is not a matter of course yet. However, current survey results affirm that activities in the area of knowledge management depend less on the size of an enterprise or its industry, but rather on an enterprise's business strategy and core competencies. In the light of these results, SMEs seem not to have disadvantages regarding the implementation of knowledge management because of their size or industry, but rather because they need to take strategic decisions to implement such solutions and have difficulties in doing so. Against this background, the German Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology started the initiative ldquoFit fur den Wissenswettbewerbrdquo to support especially SMEs on the way to the knowledge society. In the course of the initiative, the research institutes Fraunhofer IPK and Fraunhofer IFF initiated the project ldquoProWis - Prozessorientiertes und integriertes Wissensmanagement in KMUrdquo. Within this project, researchers designed methods meeting the specific needs of SMEs allowing the implementation of process-oriented knowledge management at reasonable efforts. Building up on the developed methods, both institutes accompanied 15 SMEs during the implementation of knowledge management and used the findings from these implementations to refine the methods. The results of the project are summarised in the guideline ldquoPraxisleitfaden Wissensmanagementrdquo, which is freely accessible to interested parties and enables SMEs to systematically and autonomously implement knowledge management. Based on the aforementioned results, this article illustrates the processoriented implementation of knowledge management according to the ProWis approach and, by means of a case study, leads the reader through the single steps of the implementation process towards a business process-oriented knowledge management.

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Publication

Studie Wissensstandort Deutschland

2016 , Kohl, Holger , Orth, Ronald , Steinhöfel, Erik

Durch Veränderungen in den Leistungserstellungsprozessen ist die Bedeutung immaterieller Werte in den Industrieländern deutlich gestiegen. Die Bewertung des Standorts Deutschland hin zu einer wissensbasierten Wirtschaft aus Sicht der ansässigen Unternehmen, stellt den Fokus der durch das Fraunhofer IPK durchgeführten Studie ""Wissensstandort Deutschland"" dar. Die Studie gibt Aufschluss darüber, wie gut deutsche Unternehmen ihre immateriellen Vermögenswerte bereits managen, welche Ressourcen im Mittelpunkt einer wissensbasierten Unternehmensführung stehen und wie sich Unternehmen unterschiedlicher Sektoren hinsichtlich ihrer Strategien zur Stärkung der wissensbasierten Wettbewerbsvorteile unterscheiden.

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