The present challenging environment determines organizations to differentiate themselves from their competitors finding creative solutions. Business Excellence Models (BEMs) is the appropriate instrument for organizations to create authentic competitive advantages. In dynamic and changing environments characterized by technological changes, a sustainable advantage requires strong dynamic capabilities and integrated elements of BEMs. A comparative analysis of BEMS evolution presented in the paper reflects the challenges and opportunities for further improvement in organizations. Excellence models have been used successfully also in business education. Business education reflects the added value to sound economic development, balancing social and economic interest (Emiliani, 2004). In general, it refers to competitive and motivated academic staff, quality of teaching and learning activities, leadership and management commitment, sustainability of university-business relationship, internationalization strategy and comprehensive curriculum adapted to business environment. There are a lot of environmental forces in different national environments that are placing the excellence dimension on higher education agenda. At the same time, limitations of BEMs models and the nature of higher education institutions put a lot of challenges on leadership and management of these organizations. The objective of the paper is to present and analyse the application of excellence models in higher education institutions and identify creative solutions for management performance.

The evolution of entrepreneurship in the cultural and creative sectors leads to social innovation by creating new jobs intended for the creative class and by building a long-run smart, sustainable and inclusive local development. Innovation and sustainability are concepts that can be applied to many industries, and they can involve numerous improvements related but not limited to processes, products, services, logistics. This paper supports the idea that the creative and cultural sectors can develop through innovative entrepreneurship, by introducing new methods of production, optimizing existing processes, improving the delivery methods or by developing new products or services, while also relying on the help of the government and smart organizations such as clusters. Since innovation involves improving the way of doing business, this paper will focus on identifying the available innovative methods that can be applied to the businesses activating in the cultural and creative sectors of the economy in Romania, together with the main challenges and opportunities that might arise by applying them. The perspectives of intellectual capital, creative economy and knowledge-based society in relation to the impact of innovation and entrepreneurship towards the development of the cultural and creative sectors in Romania will also be considered. The paper will also tackle a series of best practice examples of innovative businesses in the creative sectors, as well as a comparative analysis of the successfully implemented innovative ideas in this field of activity and their impact on the customer satisfaction and on the development of the local economy.

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The main objective of this research is to estimate the degree of real convergence of the countries that joined the European Union between 2004–2013 as an essential precondition for sustainable accession to the Euro Area. Through this study, we tried to create a clear, real and comparative image for the downward trend in the dispersion of the GDP/capita and the speed by which countries with different integration stages achieve the real economic convergence to equilibrium level. In this respect, we tested real convergence by regression models. Further, in order to verify the robustness of the results we applied a cluster analysis. The main results show that non-Euro Area countries have a tendency to individually reduce income disparities with the Euro Area average, but do not register a convergent economic growth and do not form a homogeneous convergence cluster, unlike the newer Euro Area Member Countries. Another representative result is that the Czech Republic seems to be the best prepared country to adopt the single currency in a sustainable way, while Bulgaria is at the opposite pole.

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