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Introduction
Innovation has increasingly become recognised as a key influence on the competitiveness of businesses, regions, cities, and nation states (Asheim et al., 2011), but it is also source of conflicting demands, multiple pathways, and ambidexterity (Bledow et al., 2009). Together with entrepreneurship, innovation finds its meaning in the creation of value. Although innovation is widely considered a part of the route to competitiveness, our knowledge of the main influences on innovation capacity and performance is limited. In order to unpack the factors that have an impact on the innovation capacity and business performance (BP) of a company, this paper aims to increase our understanding of innovation processes at an enterprising level. In this context, our empirical study brings evidence from Croatia, an interesting and understudied country, in which major interest is twofold: first, Croatia is a country on the borderline between a modest and moderate innovator according to the latest European Innovation Scoreboard; and second, Croatia is a post-socialist economy and a relatively new member state of the UE.
Specifically, one of the main aims of this study is to explore the relationship between organisational climate (OC), innovation capacity, and intellectual capital (IC), as well as to examine whether or not these categories are linked to enterprise performance and, if so, how. From this perspective, the study argues that the recognition of IC, OC, and innovation culture jointly contribute to an enterprise’s competitiveness and economic performance. Most of authors tend to focus on a single issue, either IC, OC (Gläser et al., 2017), either only some offer dual associations IC and performance, OC, and innovation culture (Schneider et al., 2017; Chatzoglou and Chatzoudes, 2018; Dávila et al., 2018) or trial associations organisational culture, performance and innovation culture (Shanker et al., 2017; Kraśnicka et al., 2018), Our study, therefore, provides the results of the relationship between the components of IC and OC, and the influence of these factors on innovativeness (IN) and BP in the new EU member state of the Republic of Croatia. Croatia is used as an example of a post-transition country with an established (but still weak) sector of innovative SMEs. The paper is organised as follows: after the introduction, the theoretical framework, and conceptual...