What makes the Difference between Unsuccessful and Successful Firms in the German Mechanical Engineering Industry?

摘要

Against a background of rising costs and increasing competition, it is besoming more and more difficult for the smalland medium-sized firms of the German mechanical engineering industry to be economically successful. The thesisthat rapidly changing markets, products and production processes cause serious economic problems for these firms is,however, a proposition on an average trend. A substantial number of firms are not only capable of coping with theseconditions and challenges, but are even able to expand their business activities, including employment. We mayhypothesize that their product and market strategies as well as their internal mode of operation and organizationdiffers significantly from those firms doing economically less well.In order to test the significance of factors which could lead to different levels of success, operationalized with data ofthe NIFA panel the method of static microsimulation is applied using the program MICSIM. This particular methodoffers the possibility of reweighting the information contained in micro datasets according to restrictions given byaggregated data (i.e. marginal distributions). The latter will be chosen in such a way that the number of firms withproperties (strategies), hypothetically leading to success in terms of lower excess capacity, are 'artificially', increasedin the sample. The research goal is to find out whether such hypothetical strategies are supported by the data.The basic finding that certain complex strategies are more often successful demonstrates that unidimensionalapproaches to modernize production are of less value. Only in those strategies wehere organization of production,technical equipment, degree of vertical integration, products and customers are part of an intergrated innovationalstrategy, is success most likely to be fuelled.