Welcome address by the Director
Everything around us is related to entrepreneurship, and if we want it or not we too are a part of that process. Firstly, we are work providers, and secondly, we are customers that want to satisfy their needs for goods.
We believe the qualities of today’s successful businessmen are excellent organizational skills, the ability to make wise decisions regarding the personnel, and innovativeness, which shows in the management of a company, production and services, as well as in marketing and after-sale services. We need to realise that nowadays the activities of a businessman are generated by demand. So the core of entrepreneurship is our ability to satisfy the market’s needs for demanded products or services at a certain moment.
Nowadays, the possibility of success can only be guaranteed by innovativeness and short response times. Tomorrow, as successful businessmen, our example will be followed, therefore we need to be a step in front and think about the day after tomorrow, and what customers might need.
Speed with which companies react to market demand is the most important competitive weapon. Companies that don’t respond to demand by their customers and other factors of the environment are destined to fail. Time that passes between the product’s/service’s planning stage and its availability onthe market is getting shorter and shorter, and speed is present everywhere: in design and construction, production, sale of the product, and also in customer services. Fast changing business environment affects companies in such a way that makes them react with constant adjustments and reactions to the changing business conditions. Today, innovation is not only a recommendation for success, but it has become a necessity to survive.
The opening of new markets is increasing the amount of new opportunities, but on the other hand it also increases competition, and exploitation of economies of scale. Operating costs must be reduced because the necessary time is shortening, as well as the number of activities in business processes is reducing, as is the relatively expensive workforce that pushes companies to more lucrative activities. The restructuring of less lucrative activities and the specialisation in more lucrative ones has become the main driving force of business activities. Strategic B2B links have nowadays become necessary. Companies need to work together, especially in the fields of research and development (R&D), and in obtaining useful and mainly market-oriented innovations. “We need to do what nobody else has done before.”
Marko Močnik, director
