Background: In the current global market, innovations are one of the tools of sustainable development. Therefore, companies must change their attitudes toward innovation strategies in accordance with international and national environmental standards, laws, and market requirements. We often come across, in particular, the evaluation of economic factors of sustainability, which cannot capture the attitudes of companies to the solved issue of the perception of innovation as a tool of sustainable development. Therefore, the Kano model and cluster analysis are used to evaluate the attitudes of Slovak small and medium-sized enterprises towards innovation, and the aim of this paper is to evaluate innovation as a tool of sustainability in enterprises in Slovakia. Methods: This article’s main research method is the Kano model and cluster analysis. Conclusions: The findings of this paper reveal how small and medium-sized enterprises in Slovakia perceive innovation as a tool for sustainable development. Based on the results, we can state the positive attitude of small and medium-sized enterprises towards innovations supporting sustainable development, focusing on frugal innovations characterized by cost reduction, as well as innovation targeting functions, standards, laws, and performance optimization. They perceive these innovations as attractive and their implementation in corporate structures as a basic function for sustainable development through innovation.

The paper is focused on the issue of business logistics performance and sustainability of countries in the EU due to their constantly growing importance in the social, economic and environmental field. We assume a significant dependence between the mentioned quantities. To research the relationship between business logistics performance and sustainability, we used the data of the business logistics performance index and the sustainability index across each EU countries. The importance of the selected indices lies in the ability to identify possible opportunities and challenges of business logistics as a benchmarking tool to increase its performance. To assess the relationship of these researched parameters, we applied the correlation coefficient, cluster and geographic analysis to identify relatively homogeneous groups - EU countries - clusters with the greatest possible difference within the clusters. The results proved a statistically significant dependence between the performance of business logistics and sustainability in EU member states. From a geographic analysis perspective, we have identified a tendency to create geographically close groupings of EU countries within the examined parameters.

Intelligent innovation represents any autonomic change with positive impact to the customer. They increase the comfort of the customer and concurrently they represent more effective, more economical, healthier and safer solution. This term is not so usual in Slovakia, however intelligent innovation are present on the market. For that in the article intelligent innovation assessment, we focused on intelligent and active packaging, the occurrence of which we have mostly noticed on the Slovak market. The paper deals with the evaluation of the perception of packaging innovations by using the Kano model. According to research results, intelligent and active packaging influence customers and therefore constitutes a tool of competitiveness in Slovakia. However, considering the specification of their requirements, the degree of impact is very variable and specific to customers of different gender and age.

The research of new active and intelligent features has shown huge potential to optimise the supply chain and enhance consumer consciousness of food utilisation. The paper deals with the evaluation of the perception of intelligent packaging in Slovakia as ecological innovations through the Kano model. It focuses on to analysis the perception of different intelligent packaging features. The results indicate that customers‟ awareness of intelligent packaging is still at a very low level in Slovakia.

The aim of the paper is detecting the attitudes of society in Slovakia towards conventional and complementary and alternative medicine (CAM). A modified methodological approach of Kano model was used for tracking the object under examination on a random set of 275 individuals from Slovakia. The stated hypothesis was that conventional medicine is preferred to complementary and alternative medicine. The results confirmed the society in Slovakia prefers conventional medicine to complementary and alternative in case of diseases. Complementary and alternative medicine is more used to reduce the symptoms associated with a disease or eliminate the side effects of conventional medicine.