EDUCATIONAL AND RESEARCH POTENTIAL OF REGIONS AND THE INNOVATIVENESS OF BUSINESSES - AN ANALYSIS OF SPATIAL CONCENTRATION

Innovativeness of enterprises is a vital component of their competitiveness on the market. Playing a major role in the changes in knowledge economy, enterprises considerably influence the economic development and innovativeness of a region. But innovative activity of businesses requires particular resources and environmental features. It is the resources which directly contribute to the creation and transfer of knowledge. There is, therefore, an interrelationship between the educational and research potential of a region and the innovativeness of enterprises. And so the goal of the article is to analyze the concentration of the educational and research potential of the European Union countries. Educational and research potential is characterized through variables which reflect external conditioning of the innovativeness of enterprises, such as: Intramural R&D expenditure, Business expenditure on R&D, R&D personnel and researchers, Patent applications, Science and technology graduates, Human resources in science and technology, The percentage of people aged 20-24 who have successfully completed at least upper secondary education, Participation in learning, in which adult participation in learning, Tertiary educational attainment. Educational and research potential will be presented as a single synthetic variable estimated on the basis of an assumed set of variables with the use of linear sorting methods which allow to rank examined objects from worst to best according the criterion which is the level of a compound phenomenon. A single synthetic variable will also estimate separately for two areas: education and research. The selected EU countries were analyzed. Data from the years 2010 and 2014 were analyzed. The data come from the data base of the Statistical Office of the European Communities Eurostat. A selection of countries and years for the analysis was dictated by the availability and completeness of relevant data. In order to meet the objective of the concentration analysis, a statistical measure of concentration – the Herfindahl-Hirschman index – was applied.