INNOVATION POTENTIAL OF SMEs AND ITS IMPACT ON ECONOMIC PERFORMANCE IN THE V4 COUNTRIES

SMEs are crucial in most economies. Although they have fewer resources than large enterprises, they strive to be at least as competitive. Innovation, among other things, is now seen as a key factor contributing to competitiveness and economic prosperity at both micro and macro levels. In this context, the innovation performance of SMEs and its impact on national economies is very often monitored. While in some countries the number of innovative SMEs is relatively high, in others it remains low for various reasons. These are mostly countries where economic growth is also lower. The article aims to identify the relationship between GDP per capita and the share of SMEs introducing product/business process innovations in the V4 countries, as well as to identify the dynamics of the evolution of the share of innovative SMEs in the total number of SMEs in these countries. The main sources of data for us were Eurostat databases and the European innovation scoreboard. The obtained data were evaluated using correlation analysis and single-factor analysis of variance.