Hanken researchers get funding from The Foundation for Economic Education for exploring how firms turn innovation into global success

Despite positioning highly in global innovation statistics, Finland faces a continued low level of innovations that turn to international commercial success.

It seems that while Finnish firms excel at technical invention, they lack the market-centric capabilities required to read emerging customer needs, articulate bold market visions, and orchestrate organisation-wide commitment to commercial impact. 

In fact, most innovations are not related to “new inventions” but the ability to combine many previously unconnected elements to create value in specific contexts.

“We want to focus on identifying, measuring, and validating the importance of market-centric capabilities for successful innovation scaling. We plan to examine these capabilities for Finnish and Nordic firms and understand their development and relation to growth,” says Johanna Gummerus, Christian Grönroos professor at CERS at Hanken, and principal investigator of the project. 

The idea is to develop tools and benchmarks that help companies see where they stand and how to improve. By making these capabilities measurable and actionable, the research project aims to give businesses a clear roadmap for scaling innovation.

The research group consists of Johanna Gummerus, Fares Georges Khalil, Oskar Korkman, and Kaj Storbacka. 

Read more about CERS: Centre for Relationship Marketing and Service Management