International Scientific Journals
of Scientific Technical Union of Mechanical Engineering "Industry 4.0"

The expanding globalization causes growing competition, especially in the context of Industry 4.0. One of the most important success factors for companies to managing the growing competition is to generate constant innovation. Companies show a high number and diversity of different business activities and follow different approaches to enable the constant generating of new innovations, but the problem is how to prove if the business activities were helpful to generate innovations in controlled and measurable way to avoid that the innovation activities were only time and resource consuming. The whole process which includes all activities for generating innovation for example the development of a basic idea to a new innovation with a successful business model is defined by the term innovation strategy. Especially for Small and Medium Enterprise (SME) is the measurement of the effectiveness of innovation activities of high importance caused by limited resources This article presents one possible approach how an innovation strategy can be mensurable through the method of a questionnaire-based business survey for SMEs which enables companies to evaluate the effectiveness of an innovation strategy. The result of the article is the description and presentation of possible indicators and their units for measurement as a fundament for a questionnaire for a business survey which helps to identify the degree of an innovation and consequently of an innovation strategy.