Innovations are important factors for strengthening the competitiveness of any enterprise. Product and service innovations oriented to new or existing markets as well as the development and implementation of new production processes and organizational structures are decisive factors in the marketplace.

The International SEPT Program at Leipzig University and Conoscope GmbH developed a new concept i.e. ‘Intelligence 4 innovation’ which captures several dimensions of the innovation process, combining them towards an application-oriented set of strategies and instruments to be used by small and medium-sized firms:

• Innovation Management
• Innovative Entrepreneurship Promotion
• Innovation Research
• Service Innovation Lab

Innovation Management deals with the fact that market-driven innovation management requires a systematic approach that allows for understanding and developing solutions which effectively respond to the fulfillment of the users’ needs. The "voice of customer" must be integrated from the beginning in order to identify the clients’ needs, wishes and the changing customer trends. Hence, the fuzzy nature at the front end of innovation processes requires the application of effective techniques and tools to drive this integration in a consistent way.

Innovative Entrepreneurship Promotion is key to the successful innovation process. For the commercialization of innovative ideas and technological developments, it is necessary to analyze different business models, especially in terms of the market and competitive conditions as well as customer value.

The Innovation Research program focuses on analyzing the innovation mechanisms from multi-disciplinary and multi-methodological perspectives. We are exploring the dimensions of innovation, factors relating to innovation and innovation practices in different institutional and cultural contexts.

The Service Innovation Lab (SIL) offers its customers services around the theme of service development and service engineering. As a consultative partner SIL supports innovation projects through all phases of service development from idea generation, through the requirement analysis and the modeling of services, to the implementation of product and market testing.