Role of Innovations for Increasing the Competitiveness of the Bulgarian Enterprises

The global economic crisis sets the idea of competitiveness and the ways of its achieving in the center of the economic debate. According to the comparative analyses and studies, Bulgaria is among the countries with lowest competitiveness in EU. At the same time the country is required to increase its innovation potential in accordance with the goals, priorities, policies and strategies of EU. The goal of this paper is to present the significance of the innovations among the other factors for increasing the competitiveness of the Bulgarian enterprises. This goal is achieved through systematization of the results for Bulgaria from the existing analyses and studies of the business environment, as well as through carrying out of additional separate study of the operations and strategies of the Bulgarian firms. The factors, components, indexes and indicators, characterizing the innovations, are compared by degree of problems with the other elements of the environment and the firm operations and strategies. The approach of determining the degree of priority of the innovations among the other factors of the firm competitiveness is based on the assumption that the lower the evaluation is, compared with the other elements of the environment (respectively the activities of the enterprises), the more problematic the particular element is, and respectively it should be prioritized to a greater extent among the other elements in the national policy for improving the competitiveness of the Bulgarian enterprises. Among the main results of the study outlines the confirmation of the leading theoretical statements in the field of competitiveness, namely: at the stage of development of Bulgaria, and having in mind the phase of the economic cycle of the global and national economy, the innovations are significant but not main priority for improving the competitiveness of the Bulgarian firms in middle-term period.