Schumpeter hoped, as he said, to explore the “inner driving force of the economy”. And for him, this driving force was the entrepreneur. Josef Schumpeter asked himself: What is the contribution – what does the entrepreneur actually do? And he saw in him a dynamic figure who has the job of innovating and helping innovations to break through. Schumpeter thus attributes the entrepreneur a decisive influence on economic development.
What happens from an economic perspective when people with room for manoeuvre meet? How should we act in and for the organisations of the economy and what effects can be expected? What expands and what limits our individual choices? Which stories develop from this?
My coaching sessions have clearly benefited from my many years of experience as a university lecturer and my countless focused dialogue processes with students who, at a fairly advanced level, were completing MBA programmes alongside their work. Almost without exception, my aim has been to improve operational scenarios, create more opportunities for the people concerned, and to increase impact or reduce sources of inefficiency in companies. My first coachees were my former Master’s students.
The ZDF’s heute journal of 30.07.2020 featured Bernd Mosebach’s report on the topic of “training in the coronavirus crisis“. The focus was on the annual challenge of bringing together prospective apprentices with training companies to increase the number of training agreements. It is undisputed that a number of reasons can prevent training agreements from being signed. One of the most important, however, is the failure of the market: there is an information gap between the two groups, which is why young people and company representatives are systematically unable to find each other. This is also why they are unable to exchange information with the other side and coordinate their behaviour. Eventually, they are unable to prepare and conclude a training agreement.
How can our company be successful? What is our business essentially about? How do we create value and how will our revenue mechanisms work – tomorrow, and in five years’ time? Answers to these questions touch on strategic management’s key tasks. Such considerations are of course relevant across a company’s entire life cycle as well.
From an economic point of view, an innovation must meet an important criterion: others must be willing to pay for the service. That is fulfilled for a great many people out there with regard to eBay services. The eBay business model is successful. But when the eBay online auction platform was still new, the brothers Oliver, Marc and Alexander Samwer founded a company called Alando. At that time, people quickly spoke of an eBay clone that had been created. About six months later, the three brothers sold their company to eBay.
Suddenly there it was, the Corona pandemic, and it really turned our lives upside down at first. Society first had to find a way to deal with the new situation by imposing new requirements and rules. And that led to massive restrictions and uncertainties for many people, both privately and professionally. Shops were closed and manufacturing in companies was shut down. Significantly more employees than before the Corona crisis were now to work from home. The corona virus is thus forcing us to separate from each other. But how does this affect modern companies that rely on teamwork? Do teamwork and management work now function differently when we relate this to jobs that used to take place in company buildings?
An invention, combined with successful business management, allows something new – like a creation or discovery – to evolve into a market success. Only then would I speak of innovations. Since companies are competing in markets, well-managed companies are constantly striving for innovations because, if they successfully do so, these innovations create special opportunities for profit. And this brings us to one of the most important reasons why successful companies are reinventing themselves almost constantly: competition forces them to do so. They have to be innovative, or they’ll lose touch with the marketplace.