Bulgaria: 5 “IN” for success

Submitted by Oliver Kovacs on 6 December, 2011 - 23:11
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Bulgaria

For the seventh time the Bulgarian Industrial Association (BIA) has presented its annual awards the so-called "5-IN" by which the Minister of Economy and Energy has also expressed his thankfulness for companies that are contributing substantially to the development of the Bulgarian economy.

According to the BIA award, those companies can be regarded as essential contributors to the economic and societal development that have “initiative, investment, innovation, industry and intelligence”, the so-called “5-IN”.

As Minister Traicho Traikov has also emphasised, this is nothing, but the real focus of the government economic strategy and operational programme called “Competitiveness”. The government have decided to devote special attention to these kinds of activities in the spirit of the assertion: "All these companies really need the public to understand them. Overall, there is only one way to achieve this - through the media” – said the Minister of Economy and Energy.

The ceremony offers opportunity for each time to bring honour to 15 companies representing various industries ranging for example from the manufacturing sector to the professional and knowledge-intensive services (e.g. firms that are specialised in inland waterways and maritime industry, packaging, precision mechanics and hydraulics, renewable energy, IT services, etc.).

Respecting enterprises that have non-negligible positive impetus in bridging the innovation gap has becoming an integral part of any kind of innovation policy.

It is of paramount importance in case of Bulgaria which is one of the catching-up countries with an innovation performance well below the EU27 average. 

In their latest publication, Korres et al. (2011) emphasise: “The rate of improvement is one of the highest of all countries and it is a growth leader within the catching-up countries. Relative strengths, compared with the country’s average performance, are in human resources, finance and support, and economic effects and relative weaknesses in the past 5 years are in throughputs and finance and support have been the main drivers of the improvement in innovation performance, in particular as a result from strong growth in private credit (19.8%), broadband access by firms (22.0%), Community trademarks (69.6%), and Community designs (24.1%). Performance in economic effects has hardly grown, in particular due to a decrease in new-to-market sales (–5.7%), and new-to-firm sales (–3.1%) are in linkages and entrepreneurship and throughputs over the past.”

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