The impact of technical and organisational innovation concepts on product characteristics

The main objective of this paper is to determine the adoption of technologies and organisational concepts in production companies and to analyse how selected technical and organisational concepts affect products' characteristics and their introduction onto the market. A further purpose of this paper is to analyse the impact of technical and organisational concepts on the product complexity and to identify where most impulses for innovation come from, as well as their impact on the product complexity. The results are based on a sample of 89 Slovenian manufacturing companies, the data being obtained through the 2012/13 European Manufacturing Survey edition, providing information on the use and upgrading of the more used technologies and organisational concepts. We found that high usages of technical and organisational concepts have a positive impact on the product characteristics in terms of increasing the proportion of complex products. The results also showed that companies obtained more internal information about new products via sales departments whilst the customers were still the important external source of innovation.