Starting Date: 2013
Participants: 22 Countries
Total Budget: N/A
Portugal joined the European Manufacturing Survey (EMS) consortium in 2013 through UNIDEMI — the Research and Development Unit in Mechanical and Industrial Engineering — and is currently coordinated by researcher Susana Medina Duarte. This integration marked Portugal’s official entry into this important European study on innovation in production.
Coordinated by the Fraunhofer Institute for Systems Research and Innovation (ISI), the EMS has been developed since 2001 by an international consortium of universities and research units and its main objective is to analyze innovation in production processes, both at the technological and organizational levels, as well as its impacts on the performance of companies in the manufacturing sector.
The EMS covers a core of indicators on the innovation fields “technical modernisation of value adding processes“, “introduction of innovative organisational concepts and processes“ and “new business models for complementing the product portfolio with innovative services“. The questions on these indicators have been agreed upon in the EMS consortium and are surveyed in all the participating countries. Additionally, some countries ask questions on specific topics. The underlying idea of the question design is to have a common part of questions constantly over several survey rounds, to modify other common questions in the respective survey round corresponding to current problems and topics from the area of innovations in production and to thirdly give space for some country or project specific topics.
The consortium includes 22 universities and research units and encompasses a broad international network that includes Austria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Netherlands, Hungary, North Macedonia, Romania, Sweden, and Switzerland.
In most countries, EMS is carried out as a written survey on company level. For preparing multinational analyses the national data undergo a joint validation/harmonisation procedure.
The latest survey EMS in 2022 was carried out in more than ten countries. Due to the cooperation of the EMS partners, information on the utilisation of innovative organisation and technology concepts in the generation of products and services as well as performance indicators such as productivity, flexibility and quality of over 2,500 companies of the manufacturing service could be prepared for analyses.
The research includes a broad set of innovation indicators, covering new products, services, technological and organizational processes, using a standardized questionnaire applied in all participating countries. The data collected are subsequently validated and harmonized, allowing for comparable analyses on an international scale.
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