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INTRODUCTION
Innovation is becoming an everyday topic not only in Slovakia, but all over the world. Through innovation, companies are trying to gain a competitive advantage on the market and to provide to the customer something new, to create his previous unknown needs. However, many enterprises solve their innovations by the current ideas of their managers, not by systematically managing of business processes. In this way, they deprive themselves of many ideas, either from employees or by gaining from continuous management of innovation processes. This reason was the impetus to the dissertation research, in which the shortcomings were revealed and the process for managing innovation ideas and achieving higher innovation performance of the enterprise was described.
Innovation is very popular nowadays. We see it as a key action for achieving a 21st century business climate. All businesses have to be innovative, as this is the only way to ensure their longevity, their ability to be competitive and, to ensure their future incomes as well. Most businesses, especially small and medium-sized ones, do not always realise that innovation is not the exclusive privilege of high-tech companies, but that every individual, every business, in every sector, can be innovative. Innovation is a process that can be learned.
The importance of innovation constantly grows, whether in the context of globalisation, the increasing number of enterprises at home and abroad,by research in various fields. Innovation is a useful tool to help businesses to respond better to changes in the internal and external environment, save business costs, increase efficiency and achieve business objectives.
For businesses to be successful in the long term, it is inevit-able to use their innovation potential to the full. Problems often arise, which are often encountered by enterprises, namely: insufficient use of innovation opportunities of Slovak companies, the absence of a comprehensive model for the creation and management of innovation processes, the absence of a coherent systematic methodology for the creation and management of
innovation processes. Especially here the space is created for the proposal of a model for the creation and management of inno-vation processes in the enterprise, which will help enterprises to en-sure more effective
working with innovation to help increase competitiveness and keep moving forward.
An important part of managing the innovation process is establishing the elements of an innovation climate, through which innovative ideas from employees are encouraged and their dissemination and implementation are promoted. These must be managed on the basis of the type of organisational structure chosen for the enterprise. By getting the right elements of the innovation climate and aligning them with the organisational structure, enter-prises can manage their processes and get more innovative ideas to be implemented, thereby increasing their innovation performance and achieving better competitiveness in the market. By managing processes, enterprises expand the knowledge and skills of their employees and make better use of their potential.
The management of the innovation process should provide businesses the basic steps to progress successfully and achieve an increased number of applied innovation ideas. In the conditions of the Slovak market, it remains a question whether companies can create the conditions for employees to be willing to share their knowledge and provide the company their abilities and skills, and the company has the opportunity to develop their potential. Without this, it is not possible to ensure innovative ideas, which, if managed, will bring innovation to the enterprise.
There are many new ideas, but only if value is created from them do they become innovations. Innovation is sometimes based on an existing idea, concept or product and its improvement. A company achieves strategic advantages mainly when it is a leader of changes, the only way to achieve this is to be innovative.
One of the possible ways to improve the success of a company, is to produce products of the highest quality and as quickly as possible at the lowest costs, is to improve individual processes, i.e. to innovate them.