Anyone who bears responsibility for a company must be able to identify future challenges. For this reason, we conduct regular proprietary panels that provide relevant information about companies, sectors or the German economy as a whole.

It goes without saying that these panels can also be individually adapted. This means that if you have an issue that is of particular interest for your business, your dedicated panel will be expanded to address your concerns specifically. Among other things, we offer our clients:
 

The Future Panel

Since 2005, our IW Future Panel has delivered answers to questions on structural change from over 1,000 managers and decision-makers – several times each year and in numerous regions of Germany. Thanks to these timely survey results, we can provide quick and cost-effective responses to current developments in the economy.

The Personnel Panel

Quality personnel are a critical success factor for every business. Several times a year, our unique Personnel Panel presents its latest insights on the topic of human resources. Since 2010, we have regularly surveyed more than 1,000 HR managers. We keep our finger on the pulse of the times and can give quick and cost-effective responses to matters of personnel policy.

As a part of society, companies interact with a broad range of stakeholders. This is why it is now a matter of course for many companies to report regularly on their economic, ecological and social aspects in the form of sustainability reports. Interest in such data has been growing for years – a fact from which companies can benefit. Sustainability reports help build trust and support image-building.

With the help of our analyses, we provide you with the relevant facts for a sustainability report that convincingly demonstrates your company’s fiscal and economic impact in business and society, and which identifies any risks in the supply or value chain.

How does your company perform in its direct competitive environment? In which areas are you the standard to be measured against? And where should you be pushing yourself further? As your unbiased partner, we provide you with customized benchmark comparisons that enable your company to reliably pinpoint its position – in general or in relation to specific business aspects.

In a global and knowledge-based world, intellectual property is becoming ever more important. As before, patents are the most important asset. For your strategic decisions, our patent radar opens up the fascinating world of patents.

• Competitor analyses enable company-precise identification and monitoring of competitors – or potential cooperation partners. At the level of individual companies, the patent radar identifies who is registering patents and the number of participating inventors. The advantage: the comparison samples from your competitors can be freely selected.
• Regional analyses examine the geographical dimensions of patent applications and pinpoint innovation hotspots and networks: Where are the creative hotspots? What is the extent of cross-border innovation activity? Are your innovators integrated into the leading inventor networks?
• Technology field analyses reveal areas for action and development by highlighting existing links between technology areas and innovations. This permits a vivid depiction of content-related technology fields and identifies the systematic links that are often central to a company’s strategic direction.
• Inventor analyses identify the most innovative minds, localize living and working locations, and visualize interrelationships. In addition, inventor networks and regions can be discerned and their interrelationships analysed.

New laws exist first of all on paper and then, if you are unlucky, as a cost in your accounting records. To prevent this from occurring, it makes sense to determine any such consequences well in advance and to engage with legislators about the possible negative impacts of the standards initiative.

The intelligent design of standards in the early stages will frequently not only prevent a worst-case scenario but will also increase commitment to the standard. This is because the concerns of the stakeholders have been taken into account at the point of conception.

To respond to such situations in good time, we analyse the effects of new legislation by calculating the constraints on your company – also on the basis of standard cost models.

To achieve optimum results, we not only make use official statistics but also collect individual data through our own surveys – always perfectly attuned to the respective set of interests.

If you really listen in on your company, you can learn all kinds of interesting things. What is the atmosphere like? Where is there room for improvement? What are the obstacles in the day-to-day interaction? If you’re looking to increase the efficiency of your business with the help of such surveys, then contact us: We conceive and implement individual company, employee or association surveys.

Throughout, we combine outstanding economic expertise with empirical know-how, and are able to deliver more than just survey results. Thanks to in-house panels and regular representative surveys, we have more than one million up-to-date sources of data available for comparison. Using these, we can further raise the informative value of the obtained results, through benchmarks, for example.