Innovations in the practice of production and trade enterprises in EU countries

Abstract

Nevertheless, the European Commission’s (2013) study shows the declining contribution of production enterprises to GDP. Eurostat (2010) statistics show that small and medium-sized manufacturing companies are very slow to improve their operations and labor productivity. The EU com­panies are anticipated to increase by only 2.4% compared with the US companies, where growth of labor productivity is 3.5% Therefore, innovations are also important for the EU trade and production companies. To sum up the above set out material, it can be said that the application of innovations must be considered as a very complex cognitive subject. The article consists of three parts to fully examine the implementation of innovations in production and trade enterprises. First, literature analysis is carried out and topic related aspects are identified. In the second part the paper presents empirical research methodology. Herein, practices of production and trade enterprises are presented, comparison of production and trade enterprises is carried out, and effects on the activeness of enterprises regarding the opportunities of innovation implementation in this area are analyzed. In the third part the article presents empirical research results, conclusions and recommendations. Literature analysis reveals that the greatest role innovation plays in international companies, however the number of such enterprises is very small in the EU. The results also show that produc­tion and trade companies from Luxembourg have higher competitiveness than the enterprises from other countries. Overall the paper glances into whether, to what extent, how companies innovate, and how this differs between production and trade service industries.