Smulkaus ir vidutinio verslo inovacijų skatinimas Lietuvoje. Parama startuolių plėtrai /

In Lithuania, as in the every other country, development of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) has a big impact on overall growth of economy. However, size related barriers like lack of financial or human resources or lack of expertise in business owners create the need for support. In this time and day, when technology and innovation are crucial for the success, small companies seek innovation in product develpoment, marketing and overall business process. As innovation is one of the key aspects of competitiveness, there is a lot of effort put on support for SMEs inovativeness. There are a lot of strategies and tools created by European Union and local governments to boost the inovativeness of the sector by providing necessary support. Financial, legal, publicity and counseling support tools are all important for the development of young company and creating the innovation capacity of whole sector. The main purpose of this paper is to evaluate the impact of state and EU structural funds support for SME innovativeness and performance by reviewing small business environment and major innovation support mechanisms in Lithuania. In theoretical part the main strategies and tools of SME innovation support in Lithuania are presented, as well as different theoretical approaches on its impact. In analytical part, there is an analysis of a project called „Inoveks“, which was run by local government, but funded from EU structural funds. There were 30 small business owners who participated in support program, surveyed about the level of support, research and development activities, inovativeness and overall impact on company‘s growth. The analysis highlighted that financial support instruments are not efficient without technical support instruments to complement them. Funded and supported research and development activities does not always mean better performance in firms ability to materialize and turn innovation into profits and the effectiveness of support projects highly depends on the synergy of all support providing and receiving stakeholders.

Grantor dc:publisher

Institutional Repository of Vilnius University

Year dc:date

2016

Author dc:creator

• Zenkus, Arnas,

Contributors dc:contributor

• Girlevičienė, Laura

Statement dc:rights

• info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess

Language dc:language

lit

Repository record dc:identifier

https://repository.vu.lt/VU:ELABAETD35558105&prefLang=en_US

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:vu.lt:elaba:35558105