Factors Affecting Innovative Activities of SMEs in Slovak Regions

Abstract

Innovations and innovation policies and strategies implementations are one of the most important aspects of current regional economics and business development issues. It is the key not only to creating more jobs, building a greener society and improving quality of life, but also to maintaining companies’ competitiveness on regional markets and states’/economies’ competitiveness enhancement within the international economics system. The goal of this paper is oriented on Slovak SMEs that carrying out their activities in eight administration regions and have knowledge or experience with cluster cooperation. Questionnaire research was executed in 8 Slovak regions where respondents were owners or managers of SMEs. For test of homogeneity of variance (homoscedasticity) the Levene's test was used. Innovations as individual stakeholders as well as whole cluster have an impact on clusters’ growing development and success and ultimately contribute to the development of whole region.