Press release: Fast50 research wins international award

 How to become an innovative company?

Amsterdam, December 14, 2009 - Fleur Lamers (24) won in Budapest "José Maria Veciana Best Paper Award '. She received the award for new research on innovation patterns in rapidly growing companies in the Dutch ICT sector. For this research Fast50 companies were selected.

During the twenty-third International Entrepreneurship Conference RENT (Research in entrepreneurship and small business) Lamers received this awards together with Klaasjan Visscher and Dries Faems. Lamers is a former student of Business Administration at the University of Twente. Now she is account manager Travel at affiliate marketing network M4N. Through this relation she came in contact with Fast50 companies. M4N is one of the Fast50 winners already for several years.

Lamers, Visscher and Faems won their paper out of 152 participants. Lamers started this research as part of her thesis for the Master Business Administration within the track "Innovation and Entrepreneurship". Visscher and Faems: "We were impressed with the collected data and decided to work with Fleur’s key findings of the research to further develop an academic paper."

The study shows that fast growers cannot be characterized as a homogeneous group, where growth and innovation develop according to a standard pattern. Companies where constant innovation plays an important role are looking for structures are stimulate this, find partnerships to gain knowledge and mobilize employees to address this.

Other organizations want to stabilize after rapid growth and focus on the existing products. Thomas Joosten, CEO of M4N recognizes this: "After a period of innovation we wanted to stabilize and position the product ‘an affiliate marketing network’ well in the market. The aim was to distinguish us in the refinement and excellence in delivering a well defined and totally developed product. "

The main conclusion from the study is that the degree of innovation activity develops in fast-growing companies, mainly depends on:
1. The extent and form of collaborative initiatives that inspire innovation. Think of open source networking, investments and the creation of new spin-offs;
2. The extent to which companies are willing to invest resources, and the need they see in making this investment has a strong influence on patterns of innovation within firms;
3. Choices concerning the organizational structure, and how innovation is organized and executed.

The paper can be downloaded from http://blog.m4n.nl

About M4N
M4N's mission is make seeking, finding and buying products on the Internet easier. M4N achieves this by linking a network of site owners, called affiliates, to product providers on the Internet. The company sees the affiliates as a distribution channel: they make information (commercial and non commercial) accessible to specific target groups and link to the right places on the websites of many large advertisers. With M4N both affiliates and advertisers can better tailor the online buying process by means of good statistics and promotional materials. For more information, see: affiliate network for advertisers and operators.

More information for the press
Lubbers & De Jong
Maartje van Oeveren
020 421 0565
Maartje@l-dj.nl