What makes a company an innovator? And how do you recognise an innovation? brand eins Wissen, the corporate publishing subsidiary of brand eins Medien AG in Hamburg, and Statista, the operator of statista.com, the leading statistics portal, wanted to find the answers to these questions.

They asked 2,056 representatives of companies that have won an innovation award as well as 4,326 experts of Atheneum Partners, a global knowledge transfer and research network, about the most innovative industry representatives.They suggested 1,800 companies, of which 256 made it onto the top list. One of these companies is Grohe AG, which thus belongs to Germany’s most innovative companies and won the title of “Innovator of the Year 2016”.

The 256 companies from 20 different industries were assessed in three areas of innovation, namely products, processes and corporate culture. GROHE falls into the consumer goods category, which also comprises such renowned corporations as Henkel AG & Co. KGaA, Samsung Electronics GmbH, adidas AG and Miele & Co. KG. Says Michael Rauterkus, CEO of Grohe AG: “We are proud that the experts have acknowledged our ability to innovate and put us on the top list. It is a great honour to have been chosen from among this large number of world-famous innovators. We will now aim to live up to our title of Innovator of the Year 2016 and to continue taking the sanitary fittings industry forward with more innovative technologies, designs and products.”