TOP 100 award: Ranga Yogeshwar honours the innovative power of Thermik Gerätebau

Überlingen – congratulations to this centre of innovation: Ranga Yogeshwar congratulates Thermik Gerätebau GmbH from Sondershausen on its success at TOP 100. The award ceremony will take place on Friday 27 June in Mainz as part of the German SME Summit for all SMEs that were awarded the TOP 100 seal at the beginning of the year. The science journalist is supporting the 32nd innovation competition as a mentor. During the scientific selection process, Thermik Gerätebau was particularly impressive in size class B (51 to 200 employees in Germany) in the Innovative Processes and Organisation category. The company has been judged to be among the top innovators for the 16th time already.

The TOP 100 company portrait published on the occasion of the award states:

If electrical appliances or motors get too hot, it can quickly become dangerous. Thermik Gerätebau GmbH develops, produces and sells temperature limiters to prevent this from happening in the first place. They simply switch off the electrical appliances when a certain temperature is reached. Thanks to structured innovation processes, the internationally active company has been the market leader in its field for 25 years. Its innovation successes are impressive.

President Marcel P. Hofsaess, who has led the company since 1992, is alone responsible for more than 1,000 patents. “That’s more patents and new developments on the market than all our competitors put together”, says the head of the family-run company. He has long since outgrown the footsteps of his father Peter Hofsaess, who founded the company in 1968 and established it in the 1970s in the course of the increasing standards for appliance safety. Today, this medium-sized company has more than 900 employees worldwide in four plants on three continents.

Innovation is a matter for the boss

At regular meetings of the development and production departments, everyone is called upon to suggest innovations or improvements – whether it’s for new products, for the further development of existing products or for optimised processes. The ideas are discussed in the expert group and further processed in a team of developers, designers and quality assurance managers. This team forms the “IQ” innovation department and combines the topics of innovation and quality. Innovation management is the responsibility of Hofsaess himself: “This has the advantage of short administrative channels,” he says. The lead time for genuine new developments is three to five years. Hofsaess estimates the competitive advantage to be at least ten years: “This is because we only develop products for which there is no competition yet. In addition to quality, this is our unique selling point.”

Small and powerful

The latest innovative success is the world’s most powerful switch in terms of its small size. It is more than half the size of comparable products. “Due to technological progress, the performance classes and also the requirements for a temperature limiter have increased significantly today,” explains Hofsaess. “We were able to fulfil these requirements owing to our expertise.” The development time for the switch was almost ten years, but the effort was worth it. And with over 20,000 product variants, Thermik now has the largest product range in the industry.

Click here for the portrait: www.top100.de/die-top-innovatoren 

TOP 100: the competition

Since 1993, compamedia has been awarding the TOP 100 seal for special innovative strength and above-average innovation success to medium-sized companies. Scientific management has been in the hands of Prof Dr Nikolaus Franke since 2002. Franke is the founder and director of the Institute for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the Vienna University of Economics and Business. With 27 research prizes and over 200 publications, he is one of the world’s leading innovation researchers. The mentor of TOP 100 is the science journalist Ranga Yogeshwar. The project partners are the Fraunhofer Society for the Promotion of Applied Research and the BVMW association of small and medium-sized enterprises. The manager magazin publication accompanies the company comparison as a media partner; the magazine “ZEIT für Unternehmer” acts as a co-operation partner. More information and registration at https://www.top100-germany.com/.