Schalksmühle, 04-12-2019. The F.A.Z.-Institut, a subsidiary of the renowned Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, has awarded Lumberg the certificate “Germany’s Innovation Leader”. Originating from the Latin verb “innovare”, the term innovation is used today in the sense of new ideas and inventions and for their economic implementation.
An important indicator for innovations are patents, the industrial property rights of an invention, often the only accessible source of information on the development activities of companies, some of which are confidential.
On behalf of the F.A.Z.-Institut, Prognos, one of the oldest economic research companies in Europe, evaluated the patenting activities of around 33,000 companies operating in Germany on the basis of data from the Worldwide Patent Statistical Database of the European Patent Office. More than 100 million patents of all leading industrial and developing countries and thus of all economically important countries in the world are deposited here. The comprehensive study analyzed all patent families worldwide over the last ten years. The number of patents is irrelevant.

The decisive factors are innovative strength and leadership, which are measured differently: Innovation strength, or the degree of novelty, describes how strongly an invention distinguishes itself from previous inventions, while innovation leadership aims at how strongly an invention influences other inventions.
The rarer a Lumberg patent has to quote other patents, the newer and more innovative the in-vention and the greater the novelty of the invention. And the more often a Lumberg patent has to be cited by patents of other companies, the more influential and leading this invention is. These two distance measurements form the core of the identification of German innovation leaders. These were identified and evaluated in a multi-stage procedure.

“Every company today claims to be innovative. We are therefore delighted that Lumberg can count itself among “Germany’s innovation leaders”, which is also confirmed by a research institute and valid criteria,” said Meike Schmidt, Managing Partner of the Lumberg Group.
“With our connectors and mechatronic assemblies, we are safely on the road in a highly specialized field of electrical engineering. It is therefore absolutely valuable that the F.A.Z. Institute’s analysis attaches importance to objective criteria of patent content and significance, which also raise niche suppliers to the level of the big players with their innovative ability. This shows that, with the clever minds of our employees behind it, we have played a significant role in shaping the relevant fields of knowledge and technology,” adds Ulrich Schmidt, Managing Director of the Lumberg Group.