saturs - rpiva

With the growing size of enterprise the share of their focusing only on regional
market is decreasing and the share of their focusing on EU, EFTA and other countries market
is increasing. The biggest difference is between enterprises with different owners. While
Czech firms operate especially on the regional and national market (90 % of firms), the firms
of foreign owners more often operate on foreign market (for 36.5 % of them the foreign
market is more important) (CZSO, 2010).
Factors hampering innovation activity
Similarly to Eurostat also the Czech statistical office (CZSO, 2008d and CZSO,
2008c) analyses factors hampering innovation activity. These factors are divided into three
groups: market factors (2 factors), knowledge factors (4) and cost factors (3). Generally (and
also with regard to Eurostat) it is possible to pronounce that the cost factors are the biggest
barriers for Czech innovative enterprises (especially two of them: lack of finance within
enterprise and innovation costs too high). In regards market factors 50 % of innovative firms
consider the first factor (market dominated by established enterprises) as high or medium
relevant and 41.4 % of innovative firms consider the second factor (uncertain demand for
innovation goods or services) as high or medium relevant. The knowledge factors are the less
limitative factors for Czech innovative enterprises. The factor of the lack of qualified
personnel is the most important knowledge barrier for Czech innovative firms (37.3 %).
CONCLUSIONS
At the sight of individual group of indicators (so called dimensions) it was found out,
that the Czech Republic is doing well especially in the dimension Economic effects where the
CR ranks on the second place. In no other dimension the Czech Republic ranks better than on
the 8 th place. On the contrary, the Czech Republic is doing poorly in the dimension of Finance
and support (the second worst place from the selected countries) and in the dimension of
Throughputs (European Commission, 2010).
The Czech Republic has below-average share of innovative firms. The share of
innovative enterprises is higher in manufacturing than in services and it is increasing with the
size of the firms. In the group of enterprises with foreign owners the share of innovative
enterprises is higher than in the group of enterprises with Czech owners. In the period 2006–
2008 the share of technical innovative enterprises on total number of economic active
enterprises in the Czech Republic was 31.6 %. The Pardubice region and the Hradec Kralove
region have the highest share of enterprises within the Czech Republic. It is possible to
pronounce that the cost factors are the biggest barriers for Czech innovative enterprises
(CZSO, 2010).
The main weaknesses of the Czech Republic in the field of innovations are lack of
the capital (especially risk capital for very young firms), insufficient using of intellectual
property rights and low cooperation between firms and research institutes. If the Czech
Republic wants to reduce these disadvantages, the authors would like to recommend
concentration efforts on support of risk capital, cooperative projects of firms and research
organizations and patenting. Evaluation of effectiveness of the government support is very
important, too.
REFERENCES
1. Commission Regulation No 973/2007 of 20 August 2007 amending certain EC Regulations on specific
statistical domains implementing the statistical classification of economic activities NACE Revision 2.
2. Commission Regulation No 753/2004 of 22 April 2004 implementing Decision No 1608/2003/EC of the
European Parliament and of the Council as regards statistics on science and technology.
3. Commission Regulation No. 1450/2004 of 13 th August 2004, by which the Decision of the European
Parliament and the Council No. 1608/2003/EC about creation and development of the Community statistics
in the field of innovation.
4. Czech statistical office (CZSO) (2008a). Innovation Activities of Firms in the Czech Republic in 2004–2006.
122