SUPPORTING GERMAN SMES TO ADAPT TO CURRENT EDUCATIONAL INNOVATIONS

Social media, E-learning and gamification - the list of current educational trends and innovations is long. Many ideas are praised to foster lifelong learning, thus enable companies to support the continuous education of their employees and ensure the businesses competitiveness. Nevertheless the discussion about usability, suitability and benefits for enterprises is often characterised by conflicting information and contrariness.

While large and multinational corporations often maintain specific departments to analyse and implement educational innovations, small and medium enterprises (SMEs) lack this possibility due to insufficient resources.

This also applies to SMEs in Germany (German “Mittelstand”) where they are traditionally the backbone of the economy. In order to develop suitable measures to support the German “Mittelstand” in the selection and adaptation of educational innovations, the InnoRadar research group - a joint project of the Berlin School of Economics and Law (BSEL) and Hochschule für Technik und Wirtschaft Berlin (HTW) - conducted an online survey with SMEs in the region of Berlin/ Brandenburg in Germany. The questionnaire focused on participants’ awareness of current trends, their experiences as well as their assessment of potential benefits and associated risks.

While about three-quarters of the SMEs surveyed knew the term "social media" and six out of ten entrepreneurs said they knew "E-learning", only 15 per cent of the respondents recognised the recent trend of “gamification”. Despite these high awareness rates, merely one-third of the SMEs actively use E-learning. As main reasons for the reluctant use of educational innovations participants stated high time expenses to implement the innovation, insufficient know-how and lack of personnel.

In order to provide SMEs with a solid basis for their decision-making, InnoRadar developed an online-platform, which informs about current educational trends and innovations. Based on the survey results an “innovation-radar” was developed. It shows how the survey participants rated the queried innovations regarding their implementation risks as well as their impact the business and its competitiveness.
In the future, InnoRadar aims to allow an interactive peer comparison between companies from similar branches.