The governments’ intervention in the economy impacts technological performance and sustainability. This role has become even more critical due to the COVID-19 situation and in the context of the continuous increase in resource consumption, which requires finding alternative solutions. We provide a comprehensive literature review about the state’s economic functions, redistribution of resources in society, and the role of state intervention in sustainability-related issues, giving a full description of the opinions and concepts primarily of economists. We propose to study governments’ interventions in their economy using budgetary resources on public expenditure, highlighting the leading factors in government policies using a suggested intervention index. The state’s intervention policy’s stability is measured via the intervention index’s partial autocorrelation function over the years. We collected data from OECD data sets and conducted a descriptive statistical analysis followed by panel data analysis. Subsequently, two questions are explored about the state’s intervention and its technical performance and technology-related sustainability issues. Results show that economic strength positively affects the intervention. Expenditures on education may lead to better technological outcomes, unlike expenses on health. The tax burden inhibits innovation and technological progress, but total governmental revenues positively affect technological performance.

If in the past, the success of innovation was measured primarily in the economic sphere, recently the non-economic sphere has increasingly become more of a matter of corporate management and, therefore, of innovation management. Management’s acquisition of non-economic aspects has been strongly influenced by the vision of sustainable development. Sustainability is a direction of action important for innovation as well, integrating economic, social, and environmental responsibility in the management of innovation, leading to sustainability-oriented innovation (SOI). Research on SOI approached innovation processes has been carried out in large companies, however in recent years the use of TRIZ (teoriya resheniya izobretatelskikh zadach) tools has been tried for SOI. The TRIZ-based approach is a valuable tool because it does not require an encyclopedic knowledge of field-specific technology and it enables the expansion of the scope of problem solutions beyond the skills of the team members. This paper discusses the concepts of sustainability, innovation, and risk management in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) for the purpose of developing a flow chart for the implementation of the TRIZ method in SMEs and for evaluating the state of innovation in such companies. Through the use of the TRIZ method in the field of SMEs, fast and efficient processes, products, and sustainable services have been obtained.

The COVID pandemic has touched many aspects of everyone’s life. Education is one of the fields greatly affected by it, as students and teachers were forced to move online and quickly adapt to the online environment. Assessment is a crucial part of education, especially in STEM fields. A gap analysis was performed by expert groups in the frame of an Erasmus+ project looking at the practices of six European countries. Specialists teaching university-grade mathematics in seven European institutions were asked about their perception of gaps in the assessment of students both before (2019) and during (2021) the pandemic. This qualitative study looks at the difference in perception of such gaps after almost one year of online teaching. The analysis of their responses showed that some gaps were present before the pandemic, as well as others that are specific to it. Some gaps, such as the lack of IT infrastructure and the need to adapt materials to an online environment, have been exacerbated by the outbreak.

At the level of an economic entity, a manager is confronted with three main categories of decisions: investment decisions, financing decisions and profit allocation decisions. The first category of decisions is closely tied to financing decisions. Financing decisions do not just represent allocation of capital, but it is also a useful activity in a certain segment of the market, using material resources and hiring human resources in order to obtain superior results. Financing decisions have an important impact over the impact of liabilities, modifying their chargeability degree and the average cost of capital. Financing decision aim for the selection of optimal sources of financing for enterprising and establishing the most adequate ratio between internal sources resulting from self-financing and from divestment of fixed and current assets, on one hand, and external sources that attract capital from outside enterprise on the other hand. The criteria on which the financial structure of the enterprise is established is based on achieving the lowest cost of the capital in the conditions of a reasonable and controllable level of debt of the company. A constant preoccupation of companies is finding financing sources for their activity with the lowest possible costs, which means minimal guarantees and easy access to them.

Information about the paper titled "SHARING CULTURES AND SOCIETY IN TECHNOLOGY ENHANCED LEARNING MEDIATED ENVIRONMENTS" at IATED Digital Library

The growing number of research dedicated to open innovation has determined a growth of company’s interest towards external sources of knowledge and of the interactions with these resources in order to obtain an added value. Absorptive capacity, together with the outside-in dimension of open innovation represent interconnected concepts. The present study examines their connection both in theory and in their representation in SMEs managers’ perception. The study that forms the base of the research is a survey conducted on companies’ managers who worked on open innovation projects. Although few studies dealing with the subject existed up until now, the vision of the managers was chosen to be examined due to the impact of a managerial decision over a company’s ability to learn from an exterior environment. In the future, open innovation is thought to be integrated in the management of innovation, this being the reason we view it as of utmost importance for the deepening of the managerial perspective regarding its influences and component elements.