Abstract
»The innovative enterprise in transition« is a longterm basic research project dealing with a system of many aspects of realisation of the transition of organisations whose members used to live predominantly in conditions of the supplier or random markets, into the conditions of buyers and state supported buyers markets. These rather new conditions require everybody to help implementation of the innovation formula reading: inovation = (invention X entrepreneurship X holism X management X coworkers X culture X competitors X customers X suppliers X socio-economic conditions X natural environment X random impacts). Inovation is every, in practice / use proven useful novelty, technological and other. None of the said factors may be missing, they are interdependent. Thus, innovation can result in a »systemic quality«, made of customers satisfaction in terms of price, quality (technical and commercial), range and uniqueness of supplies. – An overview of all +140 contributions of all 21 researchers says that everybody, inside his or her specialty, makes a contribution to methods and measures, which make us increasingly able to control conditions for making innovation and systemic quality of business, products, and services. Their common denominator is a focus on business application, less on the socio-economic problems.
Thus, the subtopic on inventions could be covered by contributions by Arih, Kavkler, Mastinšek and Mulej. Entrepreneurship is tackled by contributions by Duh, Moenik, Rebernik and Špacapan-Leskovar. Holism is covered by, first of all, Kajzer, Mulej and Potoean. Most authors tackle subtopic of management: Belak, S. Bobek, Kajzer, Mulej, Potoean, Uršie. The topic of coworkers is worked on by Mulej, especially as a mentor of doktoral and master theses. Culture is tackled by Mulej and Sruk. Competitors are the topic of Knez-Riedl, Snoj and Završnik, customers by Snoj and Završnik, suppliers by Glogovšek and Završnik, international (business and national-economic) conditions by V. Bobek, natural environment by Bastie, Eaneer and Knez-Riedl.
Insight in the work of so far in 2000 demonstrates that the year 1999 must be seen as a phase year, which in one part showes results of the research in previous years, in the other part the research of 1999 is published in 2000. Bibliographies show 8 international articles and over 30 papers in international conferences. One book based on a longer-term international research with participation of several members of this research group was reprinted in USA (which is not visible in bibliography) and is being used at least at three universities.
Hypotheses we started with are being confirmed. Unfortunately, we cannot find references dealing explcitly with the the topic of this research, e.g. in western sources which are our priority for languages. In the West, a forced promotion of company innovativeness has not been very necessary, in the Eastern Europe it did not exist. Making the transition of enterprises from a routinised to an innovative business was enough in the West, in the transitional regions of today it used to found unnecessary. The market pressure alone is enough for the most entrepreneurial ones only, they see it as an opportunity, but it can change others only in a long term or not even then. The empirical part of our research shows that the impact of encouragements offered by the effort to attain the certificates such as ISO 9000, EQA etc., is only partial and lags behind expectations. The link between such certificates and promotion of innovativeness is percieved and accepted by only a minority of employees in Slovenia. This may change in future, since the year 2000 brought systemic, i.e. holistic thinking as a regulation in conditions of ISO 9000 (called ISO 2000) explicitly, and in the basis of EQA knowledge and innovation. Earthquake Engineering
