Increasing Customer Innovation in SMEs with Digitalization

While larger corporations often lead in the realm of innovation, many Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) lag behind, especially in Eastern Europe. Their limited internal resources often become a bottleneck, making it challenging to address vital customer innovation. At its core, successful innovation management revolves around understanding and addressing genuine customer needs, fostering innovative business ideas and concepts. For many SMEs, the challenge lies not just in obtaining customer feedback, but also in effectively processing this feedback into actionable insights. The path to truly customer-centric innovation is intricate, necessitating transformations at every organizational level. Yet, with the dawn of digitalization and new media, a myriad of opportunities has emerged. These technologies empower SMEs to harness customer-centric innovations, bolstering their innovative prowess and market competitiveness. Surprisingly, the majority of SMEs remain unaware or underr-equipped to leverage these digital tools and methods. Against this background, the international Erasmu+ project ‘Digital methods, toolbox and trainings for increasing customer innovation in SMEs‘ (ICIinSMEs) was implemented from 2020 - 2023, to enable and support SMEs to exploit their customer innovation potential and thus to strengthen the productivity and competitiveness of SMEs, to secure existing jobs and to create new ones. The book compiles the main results and experiences from Denmark, Germany, Hungary and Poland.