Nachhaltige Implementierung eines trendbasierten Innovationsprozesses in ein familiengeführtes Kleinunternehmen

Abstract

Omar N. Bradley, General of the Army (1948 to 1955), stated: “Organizations must set their course by the stars, not by the lights of every passing ship.” Since surroundings change speedily, this statement has become even more important for companies and areas of business (Fink & Siebe, 2011). In the current VUCA-world ((volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity) and BANI-world (brittle, anxious, non-linear, incomprehensible) (Stöttinger, 2022) the challenge to strongly create or assure an economic base to stay competitive increases also for family-run small companies. If it were an advantage for family-run small companies to have the possibility to be proactively responsive to a constantly changing market, it could be relevant to find a method, how trends can be analyzed, verbalized, evaluated, and especially anchored efficiently and permanently in a narrow organizational structure. Trend management is a suitable tool, which includes research, analysis, and companyspecific interpretation of trend information, connected with a target-oriented impulse to change. Throughout building up a trend management, one of the first assignments is to develop a method. In practice, trend management is a never-ending process, and a lot of aspects must be transformed simultaneously with the change of the organization itself and its workflows (Blechschmidt, 2022). Accordingly, the cognitive interest lies in depicting an option, how a trend-based innovation process can be implemented in the procedural structure of family-run small companies as well as being integrated target-oriented and economically sustainable in its daily routine. Furthermore, how the basic requirements in this kind of organizational structure must look like to effectively manage influencing market trends. In the first part of this master’s thesis the following themes will be developed by a literature analysis to get an image of the requirements for answering the research question: Future-, trend- and innovation management as well as the definition of small companies and family businesses. The second part concentrates on the applied qualitative method of a case study on the basis to companion the project of the implementation of a trend-based innovation process in a family-run manufacturing small company. The advantage of this empirical study in this context is that the collected information can be documented and evaluated.

Date of Award	2024
Original language	German (Austria)
Supervisor	Oliver Schauer (Supervisor)