Management Activity Linkages to Innovation Deconstruction: An Exploratory Study of the Furniture Industry in Croatia

The Merriam-Webster's dictionary defines innovation as (1) the introduction of something new or (2) a new idea, method, or device. Many empirical studies suggest that innovation is an important driver for developing or maintaining firm competitiveness. Innovation has been linked to improving products, production processes, supply chain efficiencies, market research, customer retention, business systems, relationships with exchange partners, profitability, and competitiveness. But how does it work? How can innovation be measured? In this study, we examined innovation in the US furniture industry. First, we deconstructed innovation into three broad categories: product, production processes, and company culture. Second, we examined relationships between the innovation subcomponents and the internal/external demographic characteristics of company size, company location population, age of employees, and education level of employees. Results show that although we were able to develop the three innovation constructs, only 25 percent of their hypothesized relationships to demographic factors followed hypothesized patterns of significance or directionality.

The main characteristics of the wood assortments sale are: a tendency of growth of quantity and a stagnation of value in the last three years, a growth of the share of sales on the basis of annual contracts and contracts lasting several years with domestic buyers, a growth of stacked wood export and problems with the collection of payments from domestic buyers. Industrial wood processing is the significant segment of Croatian economics. The basis of its development is the exploitation of domestic natural resources and traditionally it is export-oriented. To confirm the strategy and revitalisation of industrial wood processing, its characteristics are very important. The values of Croatian forests have been calculated on the basis of annual production of all forest goods and services. In the case of non-market values, the sheer existence of the forests has been taken into account and the flow of various services have been estimated based upon the actual state of forests, separated between its continental and Mediterranean part. It should be emphasised that there is the case of annual opportunity costs. Regarding the market values, the GDP for each group of goods and services has been monetarily estimated by means of the actual market prices which sometimes vary within the country.