Innovation activities of industrial enterprises in Poland

Innovation plays many very important functions in the socio-economic development of enterprises, regions or whole economies. The functions are economic, social, technical and production and ecological in nature. Innovation is the main instrument of stimulating economic growth and development (its speed and direction), but it also affects the form and structure of international business cooperation. The pace and extent of creating and implementing innovation have become now one of the most important, if not the most important accelerator of long-term competitiveness of enterprises, regions, and whole countries. The aim of this paper is to examine innovative activities of Polish enterprises in 2000–2010. The analysis shows that despite the requirement to take action to improve innovation, this area of the Polish economy is underdeveloped. The outlays on innovation are too low, the structure of investment outlays is improper (only 10 per cent of funds are assigned for R&D), the state support for financing innovativeness of economic entities is too low (ca. 1 per cent of outlays), Polish enterprises are selling too few innovative products (and quantity of innovative products is declining), Polish enterprises are selling mainly products of low and medium technology (ca. 70 per cent of sales), the main barrier to innovation is the lack of financial resources