Sources of Information for Innovative Activity of Enterprises. Types, Importance, Measurement

Innovation determines expansion or just existence of enterprises. It’s an important element of competitive advantage and it is a characteristic that encourages customers to buy novelties. Unfortunately, with innovation activity closely related is uncertainty risk, that means insecurity that costly process of creating innovation solutions will succeed. By dint of necessity of high costs of innovation activity, only small percent of enterprises have their own research and develop-ment buck-up. More and more popular become external sources of information for innovative activity, such as: customers, research and development networks, con-ferences, scientist publications and journals. The paper presents sources of infor-mation used by polish enterprises in innovation activity, classify them and show its essence and importance. Main attention is put on sources, which according to modern theories of innovation and practice of innovative firms, are the most im-portant, that means internal R&D activity and customers. An additional value of the paper is a discussion on the ways and the sense of measure the influence of chosen sources of information on the process of creation innovations in companies.