Hidden Champions in Vienna
I am happy with the successful participation at the two-day conference “Hidden Champions in CEE and Dynamically Changing Environments“. The international event organized by CEEMAN international management development association, in cooperation with IEDC-Bled School of Management and Austrian Federal Chamber of Commerce (WKO), brought together over 130 business leaders, business thinkers, investors, deans of business schools, researchers, policy makers and media from 31 countries.
We first-handedly exchanged the experience about business success trajectories and distinctive business and leadership practices of “Hidden Champions” – highly innovative, differentiated and specialized small to medium size companies holding lead market positions in their field internationally.
My role was twofold: as a Member of the Board of BISOL Group, I attended as a panelist, representing one such Hidden Champion Company. In a panel moderated by Prof Kevin C Desouza of Metropolitan Institute (USA), I shared the views on how in BISOL strategic alliances are formed, what are the challenges that we are faced with, our success and failure stories of cooperations.
As a professor of Management of Innovation and Technology at IEDC, I have also acted as the panel leader on “Leverages of Innovation” where I have been joined by two executives of Hidden Champions: Petar Ulić of EXECOM (Serbia), Lazslo Suveges-Sabo of CASON Engineering (Hungary), and three researchers who represented Hidden Champions: Miklos Stocker (Hungary), Nataliia Palii (Ukraine – Ukrainian Beer Company) and Ozat Beiserkeyev (Kazakhstan – Tulpar).
Panel conclusions: To win customers and stay ahead of the competition, to survive and compete, innovation is critical. Coming up with products and cashing them in todays dynamic markets is indeed a competence. One thing is sure: it is not the amount of money you drop into R&D and it’s not sheer size that makes a company successful. Company has to do it smartly – but how is that? In the panel couple of themes recurred:
- Becoming a serial innovator, creating products on ongoing basis, is a must. Innovation lies in the hands of all employees.
- Companies have to set up innovation process and a culture of innovation. Process is important so that everyone understands how one can submit ideas, how they will be assessed, how they will be experimented on. Leaders role is extremely important in fostering the culture of innovation.
- Interesting that it needs to be explained, but products must be such that people will have reason to buy. Benefits have to be communicated clearly to the customer – at this sales aspect many companies still struggle even though it is a crucial step.
- Understanding that deep technological knowledge can be used to create products for different customer segments, different markets even.
- Creative destruction and cannibalization of own products is something that has to be done. »If you don’t do it, someone else will.«
Just a few of the Hidden Champions