Origination and development of innovative niches in the GDR and the Polish People's Republic. Sub-project 3 (Mod-Block-DDR)

Innovation performance of companies in the GDR and Polish People’s Republic is the focus of the work. It analyses which factors influenced the innovation performance of companies in a planned economy. The micro level thus takes centre stage. In addition, however, sectors, combines and national institutions and thus the meso and macro levels also play an important role. Where appropriate, the temporal and geographical framework is extended, as relevant information beyond the periods of 1945 and 1990 is also important at the micro and meso level and the influence of global technical and economic changes cannot be ignored.

The work assumes that an innovation system typical of planned economies existed in the GDR, which also led to a gradual change in the underlying innovation culture. A similar innovation system typical of planned economies also existed in the Polish People's Republic, although it differed in some aspects from the innovation system in the GDR. These innovation systems typical of planned economies were by no means - as is often assumed - merely a system based on a linear understanding of innovation. Rather, those responsible at the time, particularly at company and ministerial level, were well aware that a wide variety of actors had to come together in order to produce innovations. For this reason, (GDR) specific innovation mechanisms were developed, such as innovators' movements, trade fairs for the "masters of tomorrow", competition initiatives or material stimuli. However, the focus was particularly on process innovations and less on basic innovations. But the system-immanent factors already described in the research literature reduced the effectiveness of these mechanisms.

In the first funding phase, important factors of the fundamental design flaws of the planned economy described in the secondary literature were illuminated and differentiated in the context of sub-project 3. These include factors such as ownership (Flade/Kamosiński 2021), competition (Flade 2022a), and foreign trade (Flade 2022b). A perspective focusing on the micro and meso levels (firms and industries) has proven to be particularly fruitful.

 The Sectoral Innovation System of Semiconductors and Microelectronics in the GDR, VRP and ČSSR

In the second funding period, sub-project 3 aims to both deepen and broaden this work. Two aspects will be the focus of this endeavor (deepening): First, the findings from the first funding period suggest that specialization – a fundamental goal of the planned economy – was largely unsuccessful or even had the opposite effect (an overly broad product range). Secondly, different planned economies seem to have pursued different investment strategies, which most likely also affected the further development of companies and industries in the transformation phase.
In addition, Sub-project 3 aims to broaden the existing comparative perspective in order to increase the significance of the research results. The comparison between the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and the Polish People's Republic (PRL) is to be extended to include Czechoslovakia (Czechoslovakia), since this state was most similar to the GDR in terms of population and degree of industrialization. To address the aspects described, the semiconductor and microelectronics industry in the GDR, VRP and ČSSR will be examined. In doing so, it will be possible to build on preliminary work in some areas (Flade 2022b; Flade 2023). The analysis of these surprisingly divergent development paths and their consequences for the subsequent transformation will make an important contribution to the scientific goals of the network.