Industry Changemaker 2026

Objective

To recognise companies that have made significant innovations and increased competitiveness in the industrial sector. The Industry Changemaker is leading by example in terms of efficiency gains, production automation, data-driven management, business value created through digital solutions and smart process innovation and supply chain management.

Who can apply?

Estonian industrial companies that have successfully implemented a data-driven management, digital technology and/or robot deployment project in the last three years, an innovative process and/or a supply chain change project and thereby increased the company’s productivity and added value are invited to apply.

This category excludes companies that provide automation and/or digitalisation consultancy services, software, equipment and solutions to industrial companies.

Evaluation criteria and process

The following economic indicators are evaluated (makes up a total of 30% of the evaluation):

1. Compound sales growth 2023-2025 (10%)
2. Compound growth of value added per employee 2023-2025 (10%)
3. The total volume of investments in digitalisation, automation and process development in euros from 2023 to 2025 (10%)

The enterprise must show a significant achievement in the following areas over the last three years (comprising 70% of the final result):

1. The company has deployed a unique or outstanding digitalisation, information technology and/or automation solution, the introduction of which has enabled business and production processes to be optimised, and increased added value (30%)
2. The company has implemented innovative recruitment and development and/or supply chain innovation and efficiency solutions and increased competitiveness (30%)
3. The company has a development team, manager or department whose daily work is to create needs-based digitalisation and process innovation solutions (10%)

Definitions

Value added per employee = (operating profit + expenditure + labour costs) / number of FTEs

Compounded growth = (2025 result / 2023 result) ^ (1/2) – 1

Innovation includes the development and innovation of products and services (product innovation), the capture and expansion of markets (market innovation), the creation and implementation of new production, supply and sales methods (process innovation), innovations in management and work organisation (organisational innovation) and the improvement of working conditions and personnel skills (employee innovation).

Digitalisation
By digitalisation, we mean the development of the organisation’s business processes through the application of information technology and innovative automation, which allows for data-based decision-making and more efficient operating and thereby increasing flexibility to market changes. Time freed up from manual work and routine activities increases the quality of work and creates new valuable opportunities, thus being more competitive. Examples: a) Automated workflows and processes
b) Implementation and/or development of business software
c) Cloud technologies
d) Data processing and analytics, big data
e) Internet of Things (IoT) devices, robotics including industrial robots, autonomous industrial automation and robotic process automation (RPA), sensor technologies
f) Artificial intelligence or machine learning and machine vision
g) Augmented reality decision support, simulated environments, digital twins
h) Cyber technologies
i) Demand-driven supply chain management
j) Manufacturing/3D printing of three-dimensional components