STRATEGIC TRANSFER COMMUNICATION IN PREVENTION RESEARCH AS CONTRIBUTION TO INNOVATIVE AND COMPETITIVE ABILITY OF ENTERPRISES

The interface between science and entrepreneurial practice progressively gains importance in times when both innovation and sustainability are integral factors in macroeconomic competition. Many research disciplines are occupied with developing innovative and sustainable solutions and methods for entrepreneurial practice. Enterprises interested in the latest results of science and research to augment their competitive abilities are also numerous. But other actors in diverse recursion levels like pressure groups and networks, politics and society, too, must be integrated into the transfer processes of research and innovation knowledge in a target-group oriented way. Especially in the field of industrial and job engineering research such a complex structure of actors is to be found. In this context, the path from science into practice – that is to say the target-group-appropriate and proactive transfer – moves into the focus of scientific examination. Here, the current promotional focus of the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research “Preventive Occupational Health and Safety” offers an interesting field of application for the design of transfer since prevention is considered a central element of Human Resources and thus as a fundament for innovation and sustainability of enterprises which currently has often not been put into entrepreneurial practice yet.

On the one hand, research results on Preventive Occupational Health and Safety must not only be successfully transferred into enterprises but also have to be sustainably integrated there. Inversely, many research questions have to be derived from practice. However, this exchange process between scientists and enterprises does not always succeed. This is also the case with prevention research, aggravated by the fact that the needs of occupational health and safety often are not – or insufficiently – reconciled with the primary contentual and financial goals of the enterprises.

At the same time, the target “Promotion of Innovative and Competitive Ability” is nothing new in industrial and job engineering research. Still, against the background of the immense challenges of current economic developments, growing globalization, increasing complexity and dynamization of processes the question of how enterprises can prevail in competition comes back up again and again. Volkholz gives an answer: basically only through uniqueness of enterprises. Translated into Preventive Occupational Health and Safety, this means: the enterprise has to be measured against the scale of contributing to the company’s development of potential, to the ability to adapt to changes. Not isolated research makes an enterprise competitive; only in collaboration with enterprises science can foster potentials of industrial and job engineering research resp. of Preventive Occupational Health and Safety.

In order to make cooperation between science and enterprises succeed in yielding mutual benefits a fundamental change in the comprehension of the role of entrepreneurial practice in the research process is necessary: No more Research FOR Practice [6], but Research together WITH Practice. That means: a strategic transfer communication concept by the use of a cooperative research design is needed. This article will show a concept that picks up on impulses especially from engineering where impressive examples for successful strategic transfer communication can be found.