The use of innovative technology in production and its consequences. A German-Croatian Cross Country Comparison

It will be assumed that innovative process technologies are more intensively used by manufacturing companies from highly developed countries than from less developed ones. In this paper we will test this hypothesis by comparing manufacturing companies of Germany and Croatia. We will present a cross-national comparison of the diffusion of selected technical process innovations such as Computer Aided Design and Manufacturing (CAD/CAM), Industrial Robots and Automated Handling Systems, Automated Machine Vision systems, Process Integrated Quality Control, etc. The presented results are based on the survey conducted in 2006 where 1280 German and 108 Croatian companies participated with a filled-in questionnaire. The results show that the intensity of use of the particular technology is less country specific and rather correlated with production features like complexity and batch size of the produced product.