Small competitive businesses with growth potential are crucial for the Croatian economy, which made a slow recovery after the 2008 crisis. As discussed in this chapter, these elements have helped them throughout the years to build leading positions in the international market as reliable suppliers to global clients. However, all three companies have also several factors in common-passionate leadership, loyal human resources, continuous investments, and all-around innovations. All three hidden champions differ significantly, not only from the industry perspective but also in terms of the way they were established. is a fast-growing IT company offering online betting solutions to global clients. a family SME from the glass industry has innovated the production of glass and launched highly innovative glass products thus changed the international glass market. from the metal industry is a company that has a seven-decade long tradition and has been through ups and downs to become one of the major suppliers to global metal-processing companies. It proceeds with three selected case studies of hidden champions.

The chapter particularly focuses on the challenges that these companies face. The chapter on hidden champions of Bosnia and Herzegovina begins with an overview of the country’s economy in order to give the context in which hidden champions conduct business. This has been done on purpose, as the authors’ intention is to let the voices of practitioners be heard. It is important to note that these lessons are given by successful hidden champion managers and no reference is made to academic work within the lessons. These themes represent the general lessons of this research and sum up the project’s major findings. Based on the methodology of meta-analysis of individual case studies, main conclusions were drawn and, according to their similarity, they were categorized into 13 themes (Patton 2015). These are the main lessons from the project: major findings offering invaluable insights into the formation of a hidden champion. The second major benefit is general conclusions drawn from all the hidden champions involved in this research.

First, practitioners get the opportunity to peak into individual success stories and draw conclusions from separate case studies presented in country chapters (Yin 2014 Gummesson 2000). When conducting a large-scale qualitative research project such as the one presented in this book, two major benefits for the business community arise. An additional aim was to identify what support hidden champions needed in Central and Eastern Europe and in Turkey, as the business environment and historical background in which they were striving to succeed were (and still are) quite different from those of more mature market economies. Published in 2013 and based on Simon’s methodology, the book Hidden Champions in CEE and Turkey: Carving out a Global Niche, edited by Peter McKiernan and Danica Purg, sought to uncover examples of hidden champions, but also to compare the new findings with Simon’s (Purg et al. In 2011, CEEMAN and IEDC-Bled School of Management, Postgraduate Studies launched an elaborate project: 18 research teams worked with over 165 companies across Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and Turkey to study the hidden champions of their respective countries. He developed his idea further and extended this research to global companies (2009). More than two decades ago, German management professor Hermann Simon coined the term “hidden champions” to describe the outstanding enterprises in his home country as he examined their role in Germany’s economic development and innovation progress (1996).

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