Entrepreneurship as the Basic Element for the Successful Employment of Benchmarking and Business Innovations
Authors
Edita Petuskiene
Kaunas University of Technology
Rasa Glinskiene
Kaunas University of Technology
Keywords:
benchmarking, best practice method, entrepreneurship, business improvement, innovations
Abstract
Innovation has become the base of the growth and competitiveness in the global economy. Every enterprise, endeavouring to survive and keep the necessary flexibility in a complicated economic latter-day situation has to be creative and innovative. Benchmarking can be taken as an expedient tool for the implementation of innovative and tried processes or methods in an organization. Unfortunately, this tool doesn 't come up with expectations, if it is employed by the ill-prepared organization, which is stick to conservatism, formalism and avoidance of risk. In other words, a special culture, stimulating changes, proactivenes is necessary for the successful results of the benchmarking use. Entrepreneurial enterprises distinguish themselves for their ability to tolerate risk and ambiguity, promote creativity, improvement and innovativeness. So, entrepreneurship can be described as the basic element for success in the process of the creation of innovations using benchmarking.The object of the article is entrepreneurship as the basic element for successful employment of benchmarking and business innovations. The purpose of this article is to stress the link between entrepreneurship and benchmarking by detecting entirely entrepreneurial abilities, which help to use benchmarking successfully in the activity of business innovations. The following methods were applied in this article: systematic and comparative analysis of scientific literature, which allowed to study entrepreneurship, innovations, benchmarking and their interrelationship; logical deduction method was useful and expedient trying to explain the main features, linking together entrepreneurship and benchmarking as the activities of innovations creation; inference generation.Applying the mentioned methods, the links among entrepreneurial management of the enterprise and benchmarking are educed. Primarily, big attention is paid to the entrepreneurship influence on the creation of innovations. This influence is analysing standing on the concise research of concepts, formulated by different authors. The similarity of innovative enterprise to entrepreneurial enterprise is examined too. After the consideration of entrepreneurship as the base of innovations' creation the benchmarking's possibilities to change, improve and innovate the enterprise are explored. Lastly, entrepreneurship as the enabler or successes factor of the benchmarking is presented.The conclusions. It can be noticed that the connection between the entrepreneurship and benchmarking is tight enough. Benchmarking can be analysed as entrepreneurial tool, because it enables to transform organizational processes, bring changes in the obsolete work's order and to create innovations. But it should be stressed that benchmarking's successful termination depends on the possibilities to invoke entrepreneurial thinking, because carrying the serving the purpose practice is not the simple process of copying. Obviously, that the substantial discernible and latent differences, existing among enterprises, demand creativity and flair to use attainments of others for their own organization 's improvement and innovations.
