TYPOLOGY OF INNOVATIVENESS OF FOOD INDUSTRY WITHIN EU COUNTRIES IN TERMS OF GLOBALIZATION

At present times, the process of globalization lead to liberalization of countries policy connected with trade exchange, flow of the production factors and intensification of competitiveness. Accompanying to that, scientific and technical progress allow fast changes of the environment, operating conditions of enterprises and needs of the society. Such phenomenon causes, situation on which per the traditional factors of competitiveness of economic operators such as: productivity, quality and production costs, the new are appearing, related to the knowledge and new solutions. The need for adaptation to the changing surroundings forces on the enterprises, the actions which will eventually allow them to implement innovations, independently of branch or level of technique they represent. Food industry is within the branch of low technique, characterized by relatively low level of innovativeness. It does not change the fact that proposing of the unique products allow to stand out on the field of homogeneous offers, and in consequence get the competitive advantage. In conducted research, by usage of Ward's method the typology of EU countries was made. They were chosen by the selected indicators describing the innovativeness of enterprises (percentage of enterprises that have introduced an innovation, percentage of enterprises that received any public funding, percentage of enterprises engaged continuously in in-house R&D activities, percentage of enterprises that introduced new or significantly improved products that were new to the market). Based on the conducted research the information about level of innovativeness of food industry in EU countries and factors associated with it, was gathered.