Nowadays, innovation and standardization are very important issues. The aim of this paper was to review the relationship between the components of the Summary Innovation Index (SII) according to the European Innovation Scoreboard and the features that determine the innovation level in 35 countries (taking into account the number of the following certificates: ISO 9001, ISO 14001, ISO 27001, ISO 50001, ISO 22000, ISO 13485) in 2017. The innovation ranking was created for these countries, considering the fact of certification for compliance with the ISO requirements. In this paper, an attempt was made to determine whether countries with very low innovation activity (performance) are at the same time characterized by a very low level of saturation with globally recognized ISO certificates, which confirm the implementation, functioning and improvement of selected types of management systems. The conclusions from the study are as follows: 1) standardization can be seen as an innovation tool; 2) as the number of ISO 9001 certificates increases, the number of ISO 14001 certificates (per the population of 100,000 people) also increases; 3) as the number of ISO 13485 certificates increases, the value of the SII also becomes higher. The features are modelled at 70%; 4) the weakest relationship can be observed between the SII and the ISO 9001 certification; 5) Switzerland obtained the highest mean value set for the innovation index proposed in the study, suggesting that the country can be considered the innovation leader of 2017 from among the countries investigated. The last (35th) place in the ranking was occupied by Ukraine. Acknowledgement(s)The authors are thankful to The Ministry of Science and Higher Education in Poland for financial support to carry out this research.

This paper examines the role of institutional factors, primarily, political stability, in shaping the dynamics of innovation activity in today's modern society. Using panel data consisting of 26 African countries from the period between 1996 and 2016 as well as employing the negative binomial estimate, we model the impact of those factors on the number of applications for patents per resident. GDP per capita, education and also other institutional factors including the rule of law and financial freedom. The results reveal a strong positive effect of the rule of law on patenting activity.

In the domain of globalization, the global value chain (GVC) is formed across diverse economies. Owing to the expansion of economic globalization and the resultant global trade liberalization, the geographical isolation of production and consumption has resulted in the transfer of polluting emissions from advanced economies to developing states. Developing economies, falling in the middle and low end of the GVC, have to strive hard to expand their production in the GVC, while simultaneously addressing the consequent environmental damage and attending to the core environmental concerns of sustainable growth, energy preservation and drastic cuts in CO2. This paper addresses how manufacturing subsidiaries can improve their low-carbon innovation ability and help to achieve a sustainable competitive advantage through the embedded GVC. Data were gathered employing interview and survey methods, 31 manufacturing companies and 56 enterprise groups across 16 Chinese provinces were selected as the case study. A partial least square structural equation modelling was adopted to analyse the responses. The results indicate that the embedded GVC significantly enhances low-carbon innovation capability and promotes a sustainable competitive advantage. This study proposes that companies should continuously identify high-quality resources from the GVC and discover ways of integrating internal and external carbon innovation resources to form innovation capabilities.

Following the environmental concerns such as global warming, climate change, and environmental degradation, scholars and policymakers discovered energy utilization as the key factor in these issues. Therefore, economies are paying more attention to green finance and eco-innovation to reduce energy usage and enhance energy efficiency. The prime objective of this study is to explore whether the mentioned variables exhibit any influence on the energy efficiency target achievement. In this sense, the current study explores the association of green finance and eco-innovation with energy intensity in the group of seven economies from 1990 to 2020. By using panel data approaches, this study employs diagnostic tests that confirm the heterogeneous slopes and the existence of panel cross-section dependence. Also, the cointegration tests validate the existence of a long-run equilibrium relationship between the variables. Based on the asymmetric distribution of the data, this study employs the method of moments quantile regression. The empirical results reveal that green finance and eco-innovation significantly reduce energy intensity across the selected quantiles. Control variables such as urban growth and trade openness also adversely affect energy intensity. However, economic growth is the only significant factor that enhances energy intensity. The results are robust as validated by the panel quantile regression and the Granger panel heterogenous causality test. Based on the findings, this study recommends that green finance be promoted and environmental-related technology innovation be encouraged to achieve the goal of energy efficiency in developed economies. This study also provides additional policies appropriate for environmental recovery.

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