castus® receives TOP 100 Innovation Award

Award-winning innovative strength: castus® GmbH & Co. KG from Ochsenhausen has been awarded the TOP 100 2021 Prize. This award honors particularly innovative medium-sized companies - for the 28th time. Previously, castus® had proven its innovative strength in a scientific selection process.

On behalf of compamedia, the organizer of the TOP 100 innovation competition, innovation researcher Prof. Dr. Nikolaus Franke and his team examined the innovative strength of castus®. The researchers used around 120 test criteria from five categories as a basis: Innovation-promoting top management, innovation climate, innovative processes and organization, external orientation/open innovation and innovation success. The core question is whether innovations are the result of a planned approach or a product of chance, i.e. the repeatability of innovation performance. It is also a question of whether and how the corresponding solutions are successful on the market (further information on the test criteria can be found at www.top100.de/pruefkriterien). Due to the current situation, there was also a special section in this round in which the entrepreneurial reaction to the Corona crisis was examined. This is the second time that the medium-sized company has been among the top innovators.

Transfer technology against Corona

castus® is based in pharmaceutical technology. The company has made a name for itself primarily in the field of transfer systems. These guarantee the sterile, simple and fast loading and unloading of so-called isolators, which protect substances such as insulin or vaccines from contamination during filling. However, the real strength of the Swabian medium-sized company lies not only in the core product itself, but also in the constant new variations of its high-tech product: "Our most important innovation in the current fiscal year is an automatable safety lock that completely eliminates the need to reach into the machine," says Hoffmann. With the transfer systems, castus® is cur-rently even supporting the production of vaccines against the coronavirus.

Award ceremony hosted by the science journalist Ranga Yogeshwar

Prof. Dr. Nikolaus Franke, the scientific director of TOP 100, is impressed by the award-winning medium-sized companies. "The TOP 100 companies have consistently focused on being as innovative as possible," he notes.

On November 26, there will be another reason to celebrate: All award winners of the current TOP 100 year will come together to receive congratulations from Ranga Yogeshwar at the 7th German SME Summit in Ludwigsburg. The science journalist has been mentoring the innovation competition for ten years.

TOP 100: the competition

Since 1993, compamedia has been awarding the TOP 100 Prize of approval to medium-sized companies for special innovative strength and above-average innovation success. Since 2002, scientific management has been in the hands of Prof. Dr. Nikolaus Franke. Franke is the founder and director of the Institute for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the Vienna University of Economics and Business. With 25 research awards and over 200 publications, he is one of the leading innovation researchers internationally. The mentor of TOP 100 is the science journalist Ranga Yogeshwar. The project partners are the Fraunhofer Society for the Promotion of Applied Research and the German Association of Small and Medium-Sized Businesses (BVMW). The magazines manager magazin and impulse accompany the company comparison as media partners.