Urszula Mentel

Nowadays, innovation and standardization are very important issues. The aim of this paper was to review the relationship between the components of the Summary Innovation Index (SII) according to the European Innovation Scoreboard and the features that determine the innovation level in 35 countries (taking into account the number of the following certificates: ISO 9001, ISO 14001, ISO 27001, ISO 50001, ISO 22000, ISO 13485) in 2017. The innovation ranking was created for these countries, considering the fact of certification for compliance with the ISO requirements. In this paper, an attempt was made to determine whether countries with very low innovation activity (performance) are at the same time characterized by a very low level of saturation with globally recognized ISO certificates, which confirm the implementation, functioning and improvement of selected types of management systems. The conclusions from the study are as follows: 1) standardization can be seen as an innovation tool; 2) as the number of ISO 9001 certificates increases, the number of ISO 14001 certificates (per the population of 100,000 people) also increases; 3) as the number of ISO 13485 certificates increases, the value of the SII also becomes higher. The features are modelled at 70%; 4) the weakest relationship can be observed between the SII and the ISO 9001 certification; 5) Switzerland obtained the highest mean value set for the innovation index proposed in the study, suggesting that the country can be considered the innovation leader of 2017 from among the countries investigated. The last (35th) place in the ranking was occupied by Ukraine.

Acknowledgement(s)
The authors are thankful to The Ministry of Science and Higher Education in Poland for financial support to carry out this research.

The formation of an effective company’s financial architecture, which includes such basic elements as the capital structure, ownership structure, and the state of corporate governance, has a significant impact on maintaining a certain market position and ensuring stable profitability of activity. This research aims at determining the state of financial architecture, changing its trajectory, and its impact on company’s market position. Twenty-two (22) Ukrainian companies were selected for the study from the list of top 200 in terms of the largest volume of sales revenue received, and those that provided full financial statements for the period from 2007 till 2017. To determine the state of company’s financial architecture and the relevant market position, the authors used a cluster analysis using the method of the most remote neighbors. Algorithms of Kohonen’s self-organizing maps were applied. Harrington’s desirability function was used to determine the integral index. The selected sample demonstrated a high level of ownership concentration in almost all companies and showed that only a few individuals controlled a significant amount of assets, thereby confirming the oligarchic structure of the Ukrainian economy. As a result, seven cluster groups were obtained, reflecting the companies in terms of the quality of their financial architecture. Only five companies in the total sample were found to have high-quality financial architecture, i.e., capital structure and ownership structure are consistent and optimal and ensure that the company maintains a leading market position.