THE IMPACT OF COMPANY’S BACIS CHARACTERISTICS ON INNOVATIVENESS AND BUSINESS PERFORMANCE IN THE PERIOD 2016-2019 IN CROATIA

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This paper aims to examine whether the impact model of company fundamental characteristics on innovativeness and business performance in Croatian companies changed from 2016 to 2019. A regression analysis was conducted to analyse the impact of the company’s age as well as of the number of employees, using them as two ordinal variables. Moreover, to analyse the impact of the employee education level and manager education level, the factor analysis of variance was applied using these two nominal variables. The results of the regression analysis show that there was a significant change in both the impact of the company’s age and of the number of employees on process innovativeness as well as in the impact of the number of employees on business performance. On the other hand, there was no significant change in the impact of the company’s age on innovativeness and business performance. Furthermore, there was no significant change in the impact of the number of employees on innovativeness, product innovativeness and business system innovativeness in the period from 2016 to 2019. The results of the factor analysis of variance show that from 2016 to 2019 the values ​​of innovativeness and its three dimensions changed significantly in respect of the employee education level. In the observed period, there was no statistically significant change in the same values ​​of innovativeness in respect of the manager education level. Furthermore, the values ​​of business performance did not change significantly related to both the employee education level and the manager education level. The study provides practical insights on the basis of which companies should strive to employ highly educated individuals, which will strengthen innovation through organizational learning. The limitation of the research refers to the sample of Croatian companies only. The applied research methodology can also be considered as a limitation of the research. Differently designed variables could possibly lead to more significant conclusions. The next limitation refers to the statistical set in which micro-enterprises are not included, so that part of the future research could be oriented to their differences in relation to larger enterprises. Future research should be conducted on a larger sample in multiple countries to identify similarities and differences in the relationships of company fundamental characteristics on innovativeness and business performance. In particular, research is proposed that compares the characteristics of enterprises and their effects in more developed countries and more developing countries in order to establish new insights.