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Abstract

If there are concepts that have huge academic literature and are of outstanding practical significance in corporate practice, then business performance is certainly one of them. However, the authors of this special issue add interesting and exciting elements to our knowledge regarding business success and performance in many ways. This special issue underlines that business success, which has both financial and social components, depends to a great extent on the knowledge, skills, and cooperative skills of people in the organization, and their openness to the world of external and internal stakeholders. The behavior of people, when heavily influenced by the values of the organization and its associated business ethics, has a major impact on business success. This is also true for ethically and socially controversial industries, such as pharmaceutical, alcohol and tobacco. The research results of the authors in this special issue show that different organizational frameworks and solutions can lead to the success of a business. There is, of course, no single, infallible "recipe" leading to success. However, developing project management skills and applying a project management approach within an organization can increase the organization's entrepreneurial ability. The key feature of such a solution is that the organization becomes more open to stakeholders and processes in its local environment. This also means that an organization's ability to innovate, and improve the efficiency of its innovation processes, increases. It is an exciting feature of the special issue that most of the studies deal with a specific area of the global economy, namely Central and Eastern Europe. Empirical research carried out in Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary, and a comparative analysis of them, is a valuable contribution to the increasingly rich literature dealing with this region, as well as the academic literature in the more general sense. The first paper by Majra Hodžić and Helena Hrůzová, "A study of project management practices in the Czech Republic," addresses the importance of project management for organizations' innovation and performance. Based on the example of the Czech Republic, Hodžić and Hrůzová study current practices used in the field of project management and underline the