The Importance of Innovations for Czech Business Companies

Abstract

For European companies, as well as for companies from other developed countries, it is difficult to compete with low cost production from developing countries. One of their best competitive advantages in this fight can be innovations. Of course, due to the open nature of Czech economy, this is true for Czech business companies as well. The main aim of this paper is to refer about quantitative questionnaire research among Czech business companies. This research focuses on the importance that Czech companies assign to innovations in relation to globalization of market in which they occur. It tries to find an answer to the question if Czech business companies assign more importance to innovations than companies in more local or more global markets. Data was collected by e-mail quantitative questionnaire research during spring 2012 and was collected from 96 companies of all sizes from many branches. These companies were divided by globalization of markets where they operate by two factors - globalization of their customers and globalization of their competitors. They were asked about the importance they assign to outer innovation and inner innovation for their success on their market. For statistical evaluation analysis of variances and Sheffe method was used. It was found there is nearly no difference between importance which companies assign to innovations, inner or outer, regardless the globalization of market they occur.