Innovations are usually only measured by indicators that depict R&D-based innovations. In fact, however, SMEs, which clearly dominate in terms of numbers, do not - or not only - innovate by means of their own R&D, but through doing-using-interacting processes, for which the term DUI mode has become established in the innovation literature. Until now, there have been no inductively derived indicators for such DUI innovations. In a paper recently published in Research Policy, a team of economic geographers and economists from the Leibniz University of Hannover (LUH), the University of Jena and the University of Göttingen developed a list of 47 indicators that will make it possible to empirically record DUI innovations in the future. With Tatjana Bennat and Rolf Sternberg, the economic geography department of the Institute of Economic and Cultural Geography at LUH provides two of the authors of this paper. The paper summarises the central results of the three-year BMBF-funded research project "InDUI - Innovation Indicators for the Doing-Using-Interacting Mode of SMEs".
