Democratisation of Business How More Democratic Business Structures Generate Innovation

Democratisation is a topic that is increasingly finding its way into the economic debate and is also becoming more and more of a trend within companies. The debates reveal various advantages and disadvantages of democratising companies. Within the various models of democratisation of companies, however, there seems to be a lack of coherent integration of the theoretical integration of this into the broad corporate structures – at least within business perspective. These often refer to orthodox theoretical foundations of hierarchical structures and corporate orientations, which in principle oppose and partly run counter to various forms of democratisation. In the present contribution, minimal conditions are to be worked out on the basis of democracy as cooperation and applied to the most elementary corporate structures. In such a coherent orientation and embedding, it can be shown that disadvantages of democratisation in the corporate context can be reduced and innovation and thus competitiveness can be promoted in a multidimensional way.