Small business innovation activity in Ukraine: state and prospects

The article deals with the problems of activation of innovative activity of small enterprises in Ukraine. Development of small businesses is an important factor in ensuring the stability of the economy and its adaptation to the conditions of operation, including integration with the EU. This is what determines the relevance of creating conditions for the development of small business in Ukraine and increase its innovation activity. The basic structural parameters of small businesses and the results of their innovation, which indicate the minor role of small business in the socio-economic processes of Ukraine, low efficiency of small businesses and their extremely low innovation activity were analyzed. Also was performed the comparison the of innovative activity of domestic enterprises with those of developed countries innovation which demonstrates the multiplicity of relations, namely in 2014 the number of innovation-active industrial enterprises amounted to 1,609 units or around 16,1 % of the total, while the innovative part in the EU is 60 %, South Korea and Japan – 65–67 %, USA – 78 %. The main reasons for the low innovation activity of Ukrainian small businesses are determined. These include: immaturity of economic incentives to attract investment resources in innovative processes; limited funding for research and innovation from the state budget; lack of public innovation management, inadequate institutional environment; insufficient conditions for the development of innovation infrastructure; imperfect of institutional support for technology transfer; bad established cooperation in the chain “education-science-business”. Therefore, an important task for today is to stimulate innovative activity of small enterprises which are priority areas for the Ukrainian economy and where specific percentage of small businesses is significant, particularly tourism, medicine, IT, agriculture.