Innovative company: A story of Linet

Abstract

The article deals with the analysis of the Czech company Linet in an effort to reveal a sustainable business model. It describes the company in the historical context (birth and gradual development), the organizational context (infrastructure) and the innovation context (sources of innovation). The main aim of the article is to find out answers to questions how the company's journey looked like from zero to the position of European leader in the hospital beds production and what prerequisites the company had to fulfil in order to create a creative culture and what are the imaginary seeds from which its innovations are growing. Fulfilling this goal required to search for literature sources dealing with innovation, innovation sources (opportunities windows), innovation process and innovation companies and also to create a case study that focused on the company's innovation practice in years 1990-2016. The Linet study is based on six structured interviews with both the founder of the company as well as its current CEO. Research has shown that the company achieved rocket growth thanks to two basic principles, namely constant improvement and respect to people and market focus (openness to the outside world). These principles were applied in practice through controversial thinking, staffinexperience, learning infrastructure, learning and learnership. Openness to the outside world has been identified as an important source of innovation. This openness was ensured by systematic monitoring of the internal and external environment which consisted of stafftesting, centres of excellence, patent scanning and the Academy of Productivity and Innovations. The results of the study have led to the conclusion that the company has achieved high innovative performance through ability of absorbing theoretical knowledge, applying it to its processes and principles and integrate it into a comprehensive system that responds to its needs (adapt). © 2018 General Jonas Zemaitis Military Academy of Lithuania.