MINISTRY OF THE ECONOMY
DIRECTORATE FOR FOREIGN ECONOMIC RELATIONS
REPUBLIC OF SLOVENIA
SPEECH OF MINISTER MAG. DARJA RADIĆ AT AMCHAM, 17 DEC. 2010
Your Excellency, dear ladies and gentlemen,
It’s been a great pleasure for me to be here today to share with you some views on Slovenia, its
economy and our endeavors to make Slovenia more competitive. I would like to thank
AmCham for invitation to the business breakfast – this business breakfasts are becoming quite
prominent events.
One of the main tasks of the Ministry of the Economy is to create business environment that
would enable creation of new ideas, increasing competitiveness and development of the
Slovene economy as a whole.
In this sense I would like to stress four key words: creativity, innovation, entrepreneurship and
internationalization.
Why creativity?
Creativity is a process that involves creative problem solving and exploring new ideas,
concepts, or establishing new connections between them. Creativity is the starting point for
innovation. It is the first necessary but not sufficient condition for the latter. Talking about
creativity we talk about experimenting, inventing, growth, risk-taking, making mistakes.
Creativity means a deviation from existing patterns and looking at things from a different
perspective. Things that we fear most in organizations - imbalances, volatility and disruptions are the primary sources of creativity.
Another key word is innovation.
Innovation and creativity go hand in hand. Ideas that arise from creativity are a source of
innovation and innovation is a source of change, improvement and progress of mankind. Steve
Jobs, co-founder of Apple points out that "innovations are those that distinguished leaders from
our competitors." Innovations are one of the most important drivers of economic growth and
also the answer to solving the social and societal challenges. Innovation is not only science and
technology. The appearance of new products and services in all sectors of the economy, new
marketing methods, changes in the way of organizing business and their business practices and
relationships with external stakeholders. In this context, the creation of new businesses through
entrepreneurship and innovation, is gaining a central role.
So we got to the third key word: entrepreneurship.
Entrepreneurs and businesses are in fact those that play a central role in the innovation process,
as ideas and knowledge that add commercial value to the products or services and generate
employment. The establishment of effective business-innovation infrastructure is extremely
important for the development of a competitive economy.
And last but not least: internationalization. We use this word quite often but despite its
importance for the global economy there is no commonly agreed definition of
internationalization. So what is internationalization? Internationalization has been viewed as a
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process of increasing involvement of enterprises in international markets. And taking into
account the size of Slovene market and traditionally export-oriented economy
internationalization, mainly in form of export, import, foreign investments, plays an important
role in improving competitiveness of our economy.
Entrepreneurial and innovation infrastructure includes government executive institutions such
as the SPS (the Slovenian Enterprise Fund), JAPTI (Public Agency for Entrepreneurship and
Foreign Investments) and TIA (Technology Agency of Slovenia), entities supporting
environment such as technology parks, university and business incubators and VEM points, as
well as other public and private institutions and financial intermediaries, which represent the
support of entrepreneurs and enterprises in developing their business ideas. At the Ministry of
the Economy, we strive to make this system most comprehensive and transparent at the same
time, so that it can provide effective support to the economy. In particular, we would like to go
in the direction of greater transparency and eliminating unnecessary duplication.
Despite the fact that entrepreneurial and innovation infrastructure is very important for the
development of the economy, strengthening the culture of creativity, innovation and
entrepreneurship requires a wider view. That is a change in thinking, the mentality of people.
Encouraging creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship must begin in kindergarten and
continue throughout the school system. For example, the Ministry of Economy is very in favor
of idea to establish a creative network of schools modeled on ecological schools. Only in this
way we can become an innovative society and "innovative Slovenia".
Managers play a central role here. Long-term restructuring of business models, product
strategies and management systems is necessary in order to achieve higher added value.
Ministry of Economy in this context examines possible measures to strengthen the managerial
organizational and technological capabilities of enterprises, for example promote business
excellence, implementation of new technologies and processes, and similar.
The central question to which you expect me to respond at this meeting is "How can the State
contributes to increasing the competitiveness of Slovenian economy?" The answer is to
conduct more ambitious industrial policy of Slovenia. Industrial policy can be defined as
coordination of various State Measures to enhance competitiveness of the overall economy and
individual sectors within it. The process of globalization and technological advances led to the
revival of the role of an active industrial policy as a mechanism to promote international
competitiveness.
You should take into consideration a fact that the need to conduct industrial policy is not a
responsibility of only one ministry, as the entire legislative environment, especially fiscal
policy, labor policy, environmental policy, development policy and the education system
among others have significant impact on the competitiveness of the economy.
In Slovenia, a small, export-oriented country is currently dominated by horizontal (neutral)
approach to industrial policy, which creates and maintains a competitive framework for the
entire economy and not to selected areas or sectors. The State thus creates equal opportunities
for all market participants. Measures to increase competitiveness, aimed at promoting research
and development of new technologies, promoting innovation, enhancing skills, measures to
promote entrepreneurship and small and medium-sized enterprises, measures of direct foreign
investment and internationalization of companies, and other measures provide rapid
technological progress.
As in other countries affected by the recession, also in Slovenia a dilemma aroused whether to
lead a more active and focused industrial policy, thereby raising the status of the leading and
most promising sectors and increase their competitiveness in global markets. A country may
attempt to form targeted industrial policies to create conditions that would optimize conditions
for corresponding sector, which it wants to help or create a new one, and thus achieve an
improvement in competitive advantage in these sectors. More and more countries support the
concept of so-called "Smart specialization", which exploit local strengths, gifts and knowledge,
and past investments in capacity and thus builds on the quality of domestic competencies.
In this direction, the Ministry of Economy published in the summer of invitation to tender for
the establishment and operation of research centers of the Slovenian economy for long-term
development in specific areas. It should be noted also the invitation to tender for the
development of competitive centers of the Ministry of Higher Education, Science and
Technology.
At this point I would like to mention a new Research and Innovation Strategy of Slovenia,
prepared by the Ministry of Higher Education, Science and Technology in cooperation with
our ministry. This new strategy will establish a modern research and innovation system that
will address the challenges the society is facing and allow for higher value added per employee
and provide jobs. Compared with previous national research and innovation program greater
emphasis will be put on the economic aspect and the commercialization of knowledge.
Incentives for innovative projects, where the private sector is involved, will be increased.
Due to the characteristic of Slovene market there is another important issue that have to be
addressed when we are talking about competitiveness of the Slovene economy. That is
definitely openness of the Slovene market. In the July this year the Ministry of the Economy
prepared a new program for internationalization of Slovene companies that introduced some
new instruments that can additional assist Slovene companies to enter new markets or to
expand their activities on existing ones. We would especially like to assist SMEs in all phases
of their internationalization. Together with other institutions we are for the first time preparing
Operation Plan for internationalization for 2011 with guidelines for 2012 where we will define
activities that will be implemented, target markets and also some activities for defined sectors.
We are certain that this more focused approach will give even better results and be more useful
to companies using various instruments for internationalization.
And we can not forget about FDI. Slovenia may not be the most successful at attracting foreign
investors but we hope that this will improve in the future. New program for promoting FDI is
under preparation and will bring some solutions and new tools for attracting foreign investors.
We are well aware of the importance of foreign investments for Slovene economy: they bring
new knowledge, new technologies, new experiences, new jobs and new way of thinking.
Through all this they contribute to better competitiveness of Slovene economy. At the Ministry
of the Economy we are doing our best to create stable and business-friendly environment that
would enable all companies to focus on what they are doing best – their business. But as I
mentioned before we are not alone in creating business environment – but let’s hope for the
best!
Of course just governmental endeavors are not enough for raising competitiveness of Slovenia
– we would need also your cooperation, your support, your ideas, your creativity. Acting hand
in hand we could do something for improving competitiveness of Slovene economy.