Questions that keep coming back to us.

Since 2016 GRANTIRO has been researching innovation and transformation in a crisis and working to keep industrial cores intact for the future of our economy and our society.

De-industrialisation, loss of prosperity, new technologies, the rise of the extremes: every part of society is overwhelmed and looking for someone to blame. The way the resulting conflicts are argued out produces more losers than winners. High technology and industrial cores are the foundation of our economy and our society in Europe. The wealth of knowledge and ideas that still exists can be used to answer the great challenges of our time and secure the future of our economy and society along the way.

At a time when the established methods of restructuring are losing their effect, new ways are needed to make the transformation of industrial companies possible, including in a crisis.

The GRANTIRO Think&Do Tank finds new answers to questions that are held to have no alternative.

Simply having new ideas without being able to test whether they actually work was not enough for us. At the same time we were repeatedly asked to help put our concepts into practice in companies and organisations.

Since 2019 we have also had a consultancy, GRANTIRO Initiative GmbH, with its head office in Vienna. It turns the think tank’s concepts into practical blueprints and methods. GRANTIRO Initiative helps entrepreneurs, employees and organisations put them into practice.

Classic restructuring is usually based on cutting costs and raising efficiency in general. But when the business model of a company or an organisation is attacked at its core, there is no point saving costs or making something more efficient that is no longer in demand. What you do has to become different before it can become better.

Restructuring applied to a transformation problem is like prescribing antibiotics against a virus: useless and harmful.

The GRANTIRO Think&Do Tank wants to develop the way restructuring is thought about and carried out. In doing so we contribute to economics and business administration and help protect the economy from de-industrialisation.

As economists we are not against efficiency. It is a basic function of economic activity. On its own, however, it is not sufficient in a country shaped by high legal standards, high collectively agreed wages and high energy costs while being poor in raw materials. There will always be a place in the world where production is cheaper.

So our question is not how to become cheap enough that producing in Germany or central Europe beats producing elsewhere. Our question is: what should be produced that becomes better by being produced in Germany or central Europe than anywhere else? What can carry high wages, high energy costs and high regulatory standards? Only that gives highly developed industrial nations a future against cheaper locations.

Much like shutting down nuclear power stations before there is enough green energy, it is a bad idea to give up capabilities in a country before there is a clearer picture of what a good future will require.

The idea, held by many young people in particular, that most of the population will one day work in digital jobs from home is not convincing. A highly developed digital society needs foundations that, at least at present, the digital society cannot produce itself.

How is Generation Z going to survive working from home when the food delivery can no longer cross the Rhine bridges because nobody can weld any more and the bridges are no longer repaired?

Classic industrial knowledge makes up a substantial part of the competitive advantage of Germany and central Europe. It will be needed for a very long time to make a good life possible, including the basis for a shift in climate, energy and agricultural policy: not only for Germany and central Europe, but worldwide.

When a company stops making a profit, it is because it makes something that nobody, or not enough people, are willing to spend money on. If people were interested in paying for the products or services, the problem would not exist. What does that mean for our economy? Produce more cheaply what someone somewhere in the world can certainly make cheaper still, or produce something people are glad to spend good money on?

That holds at every level. The money is there. It simply does not flow into what a company in crisis is offering.

Whoever offers something that is needed finds buyers and capital. That is exactly what we work on: substance and business models that contribute to the real challenges.

It is not about looking for past mistakes by managers or politicians. That is not what we are dealing with.

We want to show that it can be done better. We want to turn those affected into people who act. We want to involve creative employees and citizens actively in solving problems. People should decide for themselves what they work on, what they are willing to contribute and which direction the projects take.

In our think tank, in politics and in our company projects we work with strong leaders. We value that highly.

The GRANTIRO Think&Do Tank deals with problems that have no linear, easily determined solutions. We are living through change on a historic scale. Never before have there been so many opportunities, and at the same time the problems are piling up: climate change, species loss, the turn in interest rates, pandemics, and the shaking of the established order by new technologies such as artificial intelligence, autonomous systems and new manufacturing processes.

We do not believe the answers to our challenges come out of the heads of strong leaders. Socially, economically, technically and methodically we are able to use the swarm intelligence of millions of people to work on problems. We should not assume that leaders have an answer to every question, or that they ought to. It is not only that leaders do not know everything; everyone also knows that they do not know enough.

For problems of this kind, the GRANTIRO Think&Do Tank assumes that parts of the solution are already in the heads of those affected. Drawing them out with suitable methods and developing them further with the employees involved is one of GRANTIRO’s basic methods.

The GRANTIRO Process was first developed and applied in 2016. The GRANTIRO Think&Do Tank has developed it further with every use since, and continues to do so today.

The GRANTIRO Process sets out concretely how employees can transform a company or an organisation without depending on formal management leadership or on expert knowledge that is hard to come by. It makes it possible to weigh an official plan against alternatives built on the ideas of the company’s own people.

The GRANTIRO Process allows the shareholders of a company or organisation either to implement the employees’ ideas together with them or to sell the whole business on the basis of those ideas. The search for an investor who could replace the shareholders is almost always part of a GRANTIRO Process. It helps test which ideas the world market might fund and prevents expensive misjudgements by management.

This area brings together our work on the needs of critical infrastructure, civil protection and defence. European industry holds competencies and plant that are needed there, but rarely recognises itself in them because it defines itself through the product it has made so far.

We translate between the two sides, with the “Strategic Resilience” card set and the Industry Match Program.

A set of 99 cards with a board and case studies. In three working blocks a group tests its own core competencies against real needs and builds implementation paths from them.

It is used in facilitated workshops and in in-house strategy work.

A program in four steps: recording the existing industrial competencies, matching them with requirement profiles from critical infrastructure, civil protection and defence, making contact with suitable manufacturers, and supporting the cooperation.

The first two steps are worthwhile in their own right, for instance for your own strategy or for a sale process. More on the page Industry Match Program.

A restructuring process is meant to make a company or organisation more efficient, cut costs and possibly lay people off. The GRANTIRO Process is meant to transform a company or organisation so that it succeeds in different markets with different customers, using the same people and the same facilities in the same place. The GRANTIRO Process does not optimise what exists, it transforms it.

Innovation processes are meant to produce new products and services. Typically this happens in innovation departments and under the leadership of management. The solutions that come out are judged against the corporate strategy.

The GRANTIRO Process creates alternative substance for the company with and through its employees, without needing to take the corporate strategy into account or to align with management while it is being created. It usually also includes the search for additional funders, investors or alternative owners, in order to come closer to the widest possible space of solutions.

The founding of the GRANTIRO Think&Do Tank goes back to the first successful GRANTIRO Process at Schaidt Innovations near Karlsruhe. Since 2016 the process has been used at several companies; the best known are Ledvance (formerly OSRAM) in Bavaria and the Eickhoff Wind Power gearbox plant in Klipphausen. More cases are in the Impact section of the home page, and reports about them in the media archive.

GRANTIRO tried to prevent the closure of a site belonging to an international industrial group in Mannheim. Although the proposal was supported by the German Federal Ministry of Economic Affairs, the IG Metall union, the University of St. Gallen and a well-known investor, the group’s European top management turned it down.

The site was then closed and all employees were let go. As became known from publicly available sources, the cost of the closure far exceeded what GRANTIRO’s rejected proposal would have cost. Around the same time the group also parted company with the European managers who were probably part of the reason the cost of the closure got out of hand.

The GRANTIRO Think&Do Tank treats this failed project as a very important case for practice and research. The questions that follow from it are: can failing to take up an option that would avoid substantial closure costs also be regarded as a management error? Does that harm the company and its shareholders? And could a liability problem arise from it?

The GRANTIRO Think&Do Tank is politically neutral and economically independent.

The think tank’s consultancy, GRANTIRO Initiative, regularly advises entrepreneurs, employers, works councils and unions, as well as leaders in politics and society. GRANTIRO Initiative takes care to keep a balance between client groups with different roles in society.