| Abstract [eng] |
In the 21st century, the importance of innovation in economic sectors has grown steadily, and innovativeness has become one of the key factors determining the competitiveness and long-term development of organisations. In the food industry, innovativeness is directly related to economic, social, and environmental trends, sustainability requirements, changes in consumer behaviour, and the regulatory environment. In the Lithuanian context, its relevance is reinforced by the sector's growth potential and increasing opportunities for innovation funding. The sector is dominated by small and medium-sized enterprises, whose innovation development is limited by resources, and the assessment of their innovativeness is complicated by informal or statistically unrecorded changes. Furthermore, there is currently no united, empirically based methodology for assessing innovativeness that is specific to the sector. For these reasons, the main problem of the project is how to assess the innovativeness of the Lithuanian food industry. The subject of the project is the innovativeness of the Lithuanian food industry. The aim of the project is to assess the innovativeness of the Lithuanian food industry based on the research methodology developed. To achieve the project's aim, six objectives were identified, the implementation of which is supported by the research results. An analysis of scientific literature revealed that the concept of innovativeness is broader than the creation or implementation of individual innovations and is associated with the continuous ability to generate, apply, and maintain new solutions. It was found that innovativeness is determined by interrelated internal and external factors, including human capital, organisational culture, management decisions, technological base, competition, regulatory environment, market development, knowledge exchange, and consumer expectations. An analysis of the methods used to assess innovativeness showed that general assessment methods provide an overall picture of innovativeness, but do not sufficiently reveal the internal processes of the food industry, therefore, a more tailored assessment methodology is needed to assess the innovativeness of the sector. Throughout the project, a methodology for assessing the innovativeness of the Lithuanian food industry was developed, based on expert assessment and analysis of official statistical indicators, allowing for a reliable assessment of the sector's innovativeness and calculation of the Lithuanian food industry's innovativeness index. An assessment of the innovativeness of the Lithuanian food industry has shown that the sector has a high level of innovativeness. The results show that the greatest contribution to the innovativeness of the Lithuanian food industry sector comes from the modernisation of production, digital solutions, and productivity increases, while in other areas related to human capital, sustainability, quality and food safety management, and investment in innovation, changes are progressing more slowly. Based on the results obtained, recommendations were made to apply expert assessment more widely, involving a larger number of experts from different areas of the food industry, to expand the system of indicators, and to analyse longer-term official statistical time series in further studies and examine the links between indicators of innovativeness and the performance of food industry companies. |
