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Business environment is An important determinant of national competitiveness and sustainable long-term economic growth. Business environment quality determines the risk as well as returns from investment and therefore affects investment decisions. The business environment is largely, if not totally, beyond the control of the firms and their management. It results from existing political, legal and regulatory framework; macroeconomic policies; institutional infrastructure; social and cultural context within which transactions take place, the quality of physical and social infrastructure and many other factors. Empirical research has shown that corruption represents a serious obstacle to entrepreneurship and business (Kaufmann & Wei, 2000; Meon & Sekkat, 2005). Hellman et al. (2000) consider corruption, in addition to governance quality and state capture, a factor that significantly shapes business environment in transition countries.

Globalization of higher education and, consequently, of business education, is becoming one of the major challenges for the future development of the academic environment, as it accelerates the international dimension of higher education, which is very important to improve the quality of education, research and other higher education services (Jibeen & Khan, 2015). The paper`s research is limited to business education, whereby the term Business School is used for all high level educational institutions that offer study from fields related to Business, Commerce e.g. Economics, Finance, Management (as defined in the Oxford Dictionary). Therefore, terminological limitations should also be noted.

Research and development (R&D) is of fundamental importance in the creation of knowledge, products and technologies (Solow, 1956; Jones, 1995; Köhler et al., 2012; OECD, 2012; Szarowská, 2016; 2017). Generally, governments have three main instruments for financing R&D (own R&D, direct funding and indirect funding), each of which has advantages and disadvantages from the perspective of economic theory (David et al., 2000). The financial crisis prompted many governments to introduce tough fiscal consolidation measures and to prioritize other issues over R&D. However, Hud and Hussinger (2015) note that to prevent firms from reducing their R&D expenses and to maintain national R&D capacities, policymakers in many countries reacted immediately to the crisis and increased the public R&D budget.

Global financial crisis influenced almost all sectors in national economies of individual countries, affecting the social sectors such as healthcare one significantly. In many countries, the health systems are mostly financed by public budget. Therefore the effective use of public money comes into attention, especially in crisis years (Androniceanu & Ohanyan, 2016). Therefore performance measurement in the public healthcare systém has become a more and more popular research challenge throughout Europe and the world. It is significantly associated with the global process of demographic ageing and increasing demands on health and social system in each country (Marešová et al., 2015a).

In today’s business world, the only constant is a change, so that the ability to learn, change and innovate plays an important role in business. Enterprises should actively create rules of the game and own future rather than passively react to changes (Mikoláš & Wozniaková, 2009; Merrill, 2015). Proactive behavior, seeking own way (Zelený, 2012) and creating innovator’s DNA is important (Dyer et al., 2011). Innovation and own recipe (Pearl, 2011) for its implementation is a necessary prerequisite for successful business in the highly competitive business environment. For companies’ future existence and development, innovations importance was recognized by a number of business owners and managers, who introduce changes and contribute to the creation of new trends in the business environment.