What motivates the owners of SMEs in Germany on a day-to-day basis? What trends are they interested in? What challenges do they face? The "unternehmer:perspektiven" initiative (Business Owners' Views), which Commerzbank founded in 2006, aims to pick up on these issues and discuss them with SMEs in a network involving trade association representatives, academics, politicians and business people. We aim to establish a dialogue with SMEs because the business owners know the current issues and long-term trends better than anybody else.
Our discussions are based on representative surveys of 2,000 SME owners in Germany. Assistance is provided by a panel of well-known experts, assembled specifically for this purpose, who can provide an economic perspective on the survey results. The initiative has already produced 17 studies that have been presented and discussed at some 500 round table events across Germany and, since 2013, in Switzerland.
