On June 23, we were honored for the third time with the TOP 100 seal as one of the most innovative companies in our size category. At the award ceremony in Augsburg, Ranga Yogeshwar presented the trophy to our product developers Benedikt Rauch (left), Michelle Werth, and Dennis Irrländer.
Our innovation management was rated A+ by the Institute for Entrepreneurship and Innovation in Vienna. This places us among the leading companies “with an innovation management approach that is unusually professional, even by international standards.” This year, we also ranked among the TOP 10 of the TOP 100. According to the analysts’ assessment, we are expected to continue being successful through innovation. The authors of our innovation report were particularly convinced by the fact that top management fully supports our innovation activities—not only endorsing them, but actively driving them forward. We achieved our highest scores in the areas of sustainability and—unsurprisingly—digital transformation. In addition, the competition organizers recognized that we follow the principle that “nothing comes from nothing”: we invest an above-average share of our revenue in innovation activities.
We were also credited with “a culture of transparent communication that tolerates mistakes and actively encourages and rewards innovative and entrepreneurial behavior among employees.” Our systematic monitoring of market trends, technology, and competition—as well as the way we incorporate our customers’ perspectives—was rated as exemplary. There is still room for improvement in cooperation with competitors, universities, and start-ups. In the category of innovation success, however, we achieved strong revenue and profit shares generated by market innovations. Due to our business model as a project-based service provider, revenue from incremental improvements and portfolio extensions is lower than that of other competition participants. Nevertheless, with our products supporting agile organizations — such as KANBAN, Scrum, and Holacracy within the open-source ERP system Odoo — we see ourselves well positioned for continued success in this area.