ABSTRACT. Innovation, as well as scientific research, is not a gender-neutral activity. There are few research results available concerning women's and men's contribution to the process of innovation at the national, regional and enterprise levels. Examining the current situation in this area of research, is the first and necessary step towards better understanding of women's and men's potential in the process of innovation. It is also a chance to point out a new source of synergies taking place in this process. The main objective of this article is to present the results of research addressing gender approach to the process of innovation. The first part of the article presents newly created integrated genome, dedicated to conduct the multidimensional research on women and men participation in the process of innovation, examining their traits, attitudes, behaviours and competencies. This design allows us to grasp the commonalities and differences between women and men roles in the process of innovation. The second part of article presents results of the pilot survey. Respondents of this survey were research personnel from Polish innovative enterprises. There are certain differences and similarities in what women and men perceive as important in the process of innovation. Skilful use of these attitudes in mixed research teams may become a new source of progress in the process of innovation.

Patent activity is specified in the available literature as one of most common effects of research and development (R&D) activities. Current studies' results, presented in the literature, focus on a single or group of enterprises, but do not take into account the relationship between R&D spending and patent activity at the mesoeconomic level, exemplified by the business enterprise sector. The scope of this article is to evaluate the efficiency of R&D expenditure from the patent activity point of view. The main research question is: does the efficiency of R&D expenditure, measured by the patent activity of the business enterprise sector, improve in the long term? The research covers 28 European Union countries. The conclusion is that increasing patent activity in the business enterprise sector, in the long term, depends on the management of R&D activities in entities belonging to that sector, rather than increasing R&D spending.

ABSTRACT. The growing importance of gender studies in many disciplines is recently presented in the literature. However, there is no research on gender as the extraordinary source of innovation development. Specifically, patent activity is among the important elements determining the involvement of men and women in the innovation process. The article presents the results of studies focused on the patent inventors' role, both women and men, in development activities of entities belonging to the business enterprise sector. The research objectives were: 1) to capture the statistical picture of inventive activity taking gender into account, and 2) to identify the directions and dynamics of change with regard to the proportion of inventors in the EU member states. The main results shows the increasing role of women rather than man as the inventors of patents in the business enterprise sector of the leading EU countries in a long term.

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