Fraunhofer-Institut für System- und Innovationsforschung ISI

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Techno-organisational innovation in the european manufacturing industry

(Fraunhofer ISI, 2005)
Armbruster, H.
;
Kinkel, S.
;
Lay, G.
;
Maloca, S.

Competitive advantages of European companies are not only generated by R&D based product innovations but also by technical and non-technical process innovations aiming to modernise manufacturing processes. The European Manufacturing Survey (EMS) provides diffusion rates of technical and non-technical innovations across nine European countries. Results reveal that the use of new technologies such as robots, enterprise resource planning and teleservice are most widely spread in Switzerland, Germany and Austria. Contrary to technical innovations, non-technical innovations such as team work, continuous improvement processes and regular appraisal interviews do not show a clear overall pattern across European countries. The use of these non-technical innovations in the surveyed countries varies across the organisational concepts. Reasons for differences in the diffusion rates of technical and non-technical innovations across European countries lay in the field of domestic and labour market conditions and cultural differences between the surveyed European countries.