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Innovation and Creativity in SMEs
book

Innovation and Creativity in SMEs

by Claudine Gay, Berangere L. Szostak
September 2019
Intermediate to advanced content levelIntermediate to advanced
230 pages
6h 24m
English
Wiley-ISTE
Content preview from Innovation and Creativity in SMEs

Foreword by Gaëtan de Sainte MarieInnovating in SMEs or How to Make Your Company Collaborative and Desirable

One day, Pierre Bellon, founder of Sodexo, who made the company he created a world champion, answered the following question: “What explains Sodexo’s success?” His answer was wonderful in my opinion: “The sum of our successes is slightly greater than the sum of our failures.” An SME manager knows that failure is part of the road to success, and that it is a source of continuous improvement.

Before creating PME Centrale in 2001, I had created my first company in Sydney, which was a kind of first cousin, so to speak. It met the same objective: to pool SME resources to make them stronger and more together. This Australian company did not work. Among the mistakes I made, the most significant was probably the following: I prepared my offer with my partners on the basis of the intuition I had, and once the offer was packaged, after many months, I went to meet prospects. It was a failure... The idea was perceived as excellent, but the SME owners I met were not ready to change: I was thinking too far in advance; the step was too significant to take, etc. So, by creating PME Centrale in France, two years later in 2003, and Qantis in 2018, I proceeded completely differently: I kept my intuition (which was the same!), and I co-constructed the offer with the first members. It was not easy, but it eventually worked, because we adapted the offer to their needs and, little by little, ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9781786303172Purchase book