From suggestion system to entrepreneurship over 30 years

prof. ddr. Matjaž Mulej, Ex-conference Chair, Faculty of Business and Economics, University of Maribor

Back in 1978 Prof. Dr. Robert Massey from Washington, D.C., USA and his wife Reggie came to Maribor to join the Summer School for students coming to Slovenia on internships exchange. He believed that self-management was the best environment for the invention-innovation activity of many coworkers to flourish. In Yugoslavia we have never heard about this connection. It could exist, if self-management was understood in the Japanese style. But his idea made as friends for ever. Later I learned a lot about this topic with his help.

Then, in 1979 my best-seller book 'Creative Work and The Dialectical System Theory' was published (in Slovenian). About in the same period Božidar Hribernik and his team launched the method for activating many coworkers for suggesting novelties aimed at becoming innovations – The Suggestion System or Submit your Idea System. They were able to persuade Ekonomski center Maribor to hire a person to support this activity. Soon they found a link between their effort and my book and invited me to join their team.

In 1981 I spent four months at two universities in USA as a Fulbright visiting professor. I devoted all my free time to the said topic. In June after my return Hribernik and his team sponsored their second event. I joined the team by editing proceedings for Naše gospodarstvo. This journal provided room for PODIM proceedings for many years, but no longer so over the recent years. Thus, ideas and experiences related to the invention-innovation-diffusion process reached several thousands of readers of Naše gospodarstvo, then.

Over the following many years I have kept editing both the conference and its proceedings – every year with another related topic. We had, always in Maribor, several hundred delegates and several co-sponsors, including the Presidency of Slovenia (who had a member with official responsibility for promotion of invention-innovation activity) and the Chamber of Economy of Yugoslavia. But the main point, the innovation of the conference, in my mind, was the program switch from the Suggestion System to innovation of management aimed at a more successful innovation management, all way to stressing entrepreneurship and the entrepreneurial spirit as crucial preconditions of the invention-innovation-diffusion process.

Before falling apart of Yugoslavia the audience consisted mostly of several hundred professionals of the invention-innovation offices and other promoters, including company managers. In early 1980’s most of the bigger companies in Slovenia fell apart, causing this type of jobs and promoters to be dismissed in about 95%. The new owners and managers tended to consider them unnecessary for their objectives, unfortunately. – This has very much to do with the later troubles of the Slovenian economy, including the current ones.

For several years we – successfully – tried to let the PODIM conferences survive by inviting several other professional associations as its co-sponsors. As you see now, PODIM survived, but for several years it was a rather small event, in terms of its audience, which served making other professionals aware of the essence of the invention-innovation-diffusion process and innovation as its outcome, in their professional area, too, not only in the technological and production parts of companies.

Since my younger colleagues – Rebernik, Rus and others – have taken organization of PODIM on their list of activities, PODIM is running very well again. This makes me happy. They made it an important international conference. The acronym PODIM now means a very different content than close to 30 years ago when we introduced it: Entrepreneurship, innovation and management. This change demonstrates how PODIM has been developing over the three decades – as a case of invention-innovation-diffusion process.