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Manufacturing Strategies and Structures in Croatia

This research is done in cooperation with Fraunhofer Institut (ISI – Institut Systemtechnik und Innovationforschung). The survey is conducted in parallel in 22 countries which will allow cross country analysis of innovation issues in different regions. The survey was mailed to companies 511 in Croatia and we got 50 completed surveys back. Our main findings are that innovation is important to Croatian companies. The innovation issue had the highest importance on the overall sample. The main way of modernising is through investment in technology even though large companies put also great emphasis on employee training. But surprisingly it is by services that companies differentiate. The most important organizational aspects in innovating the production is team work. Team work is important in production and new product development through concurrent engineering because time to market does not allow the old sequential type of new product development. The other important factor is fragmentation of production meaning that companies are able to customise their products according to customer’ s needs and wishes. This research is only a beginning of a journey in exploring innovation in production in Croatia. So far we can conclude that the companies really consider innovation as a big issue but only a very low percentage revenues (2, 13%) is really invested in innovation. This issue will be further explored when we explore the technological changes Croatian companies undertook.

Manufacturing Strategies; Croatia

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