Bücher von Baltic Sea Academy

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.

A rising need for energy-saving solutions and the use of renewable energies has become particularly urgent in some Baltic Sea countries, given a high proportion of old buildings in need of renovation. For instance, in Latvia, 99% of existing buildings were built with very poor energy efficiency standards before 1993. In order to reach the EU energy 2020 goals, according to the 'Build up skills'national reports, in some EU member states the percentage of skilled workers has to be raised by up to 50%. Partners from Estonia, Germany, Hungary and Poland teamed up, to tackle this issue and develop and implement a further training course for Energy Service Managers, based on the specific needs of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). A compact course of 80 training hours has been designed as well as a comprehensive course of about 300 training hours. The background information, concept, curricula, including a train-the-trainer program, evaluation and experiences with this course is shared in this publication.

All countries around the Baltic Sea region face a great shortage of entrepreneurs and managers for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). This substantially limits economic growth and innovation capacity. Due to demographic reasons population and thus working age population is expected to decline in almost all European countries in the near future, so that this shortage will even increase and have a strong impact on the SMEs, that must compete with major industries for the few well-qualified talents. To tackle this pressing issue, experts from Denmark, Germany, Latvia, Lithuania and Norway teamed up in an EU-funded project to develop a common vocational training titled 'Master Craftsman' that reflects the needs for SMEs, in particular from the craft sector. This publication contains all relevant information, from the concept and background to the actual curricula and example for examination regulations.