Ivana Bilić

Macro and Micro Innovativeness of the Western Balkan Countries

Innovativeness has been identified as a key success factor in todays’ increasingly competitive and complex environment. It is considered to have a key role as a driver of economic growth and essential instrument for business performance improvement of enterprises especially for emerging economies and economies in transition. Innovation readiness offers a possibility of new growth platforms both on macro level when talking about the economic growth as the biggest national issue and micro level when talking about competitiveness and business performances of enterprises. Engaging innovation potential in a way that will keep up with the pace of technological change and changing demands is indispensable in order to increase competitiveness on both levels. The Western Balkan countries are representative examples of economies in transition as they have witnessed significant changes and economic transformations since the beginning of the twenty-first century, and now they are challenged to keep the growth and improve it. Innovativeness has an influential role in responding to this challenge. The objective of this paper is to analyze cross-country differences and portray the situation in the region giving the answer to the following questions: how are Western Balkan countries ranked on world economies’ innovation capabilities scoreboards, how is their ranking changing over time, and how do they differ between themselves? In order to answer these questions, comparative cross-country analysis of innovativeness in Western Balkan countries was conducted. The findings build upon the comprehensive and comparable statistical date from public databases including studies on global innovativeness.

Communication with Persons with Disabilities vs. Communication with Differently Abled Persons

My efforts regarding persons with disabilities have so far been mainly focused on economic, more precisely on communication aspects of their inclusion. In this chapter, my main research focus is in; first, to present cornerstones of any communication in an extensive theoretical research on attitudes and communication with persons with disabilities. Secondly, to present attitudes toward communication from different perspectives, communication of other survey participants, with or without previous contact with persons with disabilities, and finally other research where persons with disabilities perception of communication with others will be in focus. Empirical part of this study was conducted at the Faculty of Economics, University of Split as a part of the thesis of two undergraduate students. The study was designed as a part of participation in the project “Equal Access to Higher Education for Persons with Disabilities” where the author of this paper served as a project partner.

Resilient IoT eHealth solutions in case of disasters

Disaster-resilient solutions are those realistic, time dependent and policy driven processes to enable technical solutions working even in the case of a disaster. Two issues are tackled within this paper, what are the eHealth IoT solutions for disasters and analyze if these eHealth IoT solutions can be disaster-resilient. We present a scenario when eHealth IoT solutions can be used to manage the consequences after a natural or any other disaster as a kind of a technology-enabled crisis management. Consequences occur when the existing policies allow unpreparedness, unprotectedness, and inability to respond effectively. Technology-enabled disaster resilience, in our case, is a way-out strategy using an eHealth IoT solution. We introduce a new IoT eHealth solution to be used in an emergency after a disaster. However, the design of this solution should be also disaster resilient, without dependence on infrastructure that might be also exposed to a disaster. The corresponding architecture and solution are described and their properties analyzed.