THE RELATIONSHIP OF INNOVATION AND THE PERFORMANCE OF BUSINESS LOGISTICS IN THE EU

At present, innovations have a significant impact on the success of the company on the market, and in the case of their correct implementation, they represent a competitive advantage for the company, which significantly differentiates it from the competition. At the same time, we can perceive them as an essential part of business, as the market, consumers and their preferences change dynamically, and through innovations the company can respond more flexibly to these changes and thus gain an advantage over its competition. The paper is dealing with the issue of innovation and business logistics performance in the EU. To examine the relationship between innovation and business logistics performance, we used data on the Innovation Index and the Logistics Performance Index in individual EU countries. The correlation analysis was applied to assess the closeness of the statistical dependence among the investigated variables, and subsequently we applied cluster analysis to decompose the basic set of investigated objects into several relatively homogeneous subsets - clusters. The results confirm the dependence between innovation and business logistics performance in EU countries. Regarding the results of the analysis, we can state that countries with the greatest business logistics and innovation performance tend to form geographically close clusters, and this decreases with increasing geographical distance from more efficient countries.