Slovenian Employee Suggestion Systems: A Continuous Improvement Or a Continuous Stagnation?

The operations management theory emphasizes the management of incremental innovations as one of the cornerstones for continuous improvement of a firm’s operational efficiency. Also in Slovenia, the companies follow the foreign practices in this field as well as developing their own solutions. Unfortunately, the introduction of employee suggestion systems very often turns out to be a failure. The paper aims to analyze the incremental innovation management systems, in particular the employee suggestion systems, on a sample of Slovenian companies from the automotive and fabricated metal products industry. Based on the key output indices, two groups of companies are defined with a different ability to introduce innovations. The main differences in the organization of the employee suggestions management between the two groups are presented. As such, the research results may contribute to an improvement and further growth of these systems in Slovenian companies.