Customer Is King – Enterprises Intensify Innovation Efforts
In the view of German managers, the success of industrial enterprises depends decisively on their innovative capability. On a scale of 1 to 10, managers rate its influence at an average of 8.7 points. Acting on this awareness, many enterprises implemented more actions designed to promote innovation in 2014 than in the previous year. This is a key finding of the 2015 Industry Innovation Index, a cross-sector study commissioned by the specialty chemicals company ALTANA for the second year in a row, for which the market research firm Forsa-Institut surveyed 250 top decision makers and 250 entry-level employees in German industrial companies.
Of 11 actions that are known to be important for promoting innovation, the focus on customer needs was the one most often implemented in the surveyed industrial enterprises. A total of 55 percent of the companies systematically analyze the needs of their target group before developing new products. That is 9 percentage points more than in the previous year's survey at the end of 2013.