Business Innovative Environment as a Prerequisite for a Long-run Competitive Advantage.

The purpose of this paper is to highlight the importance of innovation in businesses. It tries to illustrate the way companies could invest in lifelong learning focusing on the entrepreneurship education in order to support creativity and innovation as prerequisite for a short-run increase in their profits and mostly for a long-run sustainable competitive advantage. In the first part of the paper, we will focus on companies. In some companies the manager is thinking how creativity could help. One person may generate 10 ideas; conversely, 5 persons may generate 50 ideas. From those 50 ideas the manager can use at least 3 of them to increase the profit. This is how intellectual capital and creativity should be enhanced. Furthermore, it will influence the consumers buying renewed products in a more profitable way. The second part of the paper, we will highlight the importance of taking into account some best practices cases. Nowadays, with Internet banking, Euro Automatic Teller Machine (ATM) and credit cards, the final user has been granted options for the monetary transactions. People like consumers want their needs to be satisfied and this is one of the reasons why they have grown accustomed to demanding more and more from their banking services providers. In the last part of the paper, we will discuss about the creativity models and ways in which these models might influence the workers and the leaders to come up with new ideas, be creative and generate larger profit. From a methodological point of view we applied both the quantitative method (surveys) and the qualitative one (in terms of focus-groups & interviews). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]