On the strategic planning, innovation activities and economic performance of industrial companies

Proposed paper deals with the "in-situ" situation of strategic planning, innovation activities and consequent economic performance of Czech and Slovak industrial companies based on questionnaire research results. The relations between selected parameters were aimed and statistically tested on the sample of 254 industrial companies active in Czech and Slovak republic in years 2009-2011. Four hypotheses were evaluated, with the goal of enlightening mutual relations of strategy-innovations-performance behavioural characteristics of the studied companies. In findings, there is well apparent, that written detailed strategic document has mostly bigger companies (above 250 employees and gross annual turnover over 1 bill. CZK), who plan longer in advance (mostly 5 to 10 years or 3 to 5 years) than smaller companies that have more often concise written (a plan mostly from 1 to 3 years in advance) or not written strategic document (11 to 50 employees and gross annual turnover 11 to 100 mil. CZK). The (industrial) companies with written detailed strategic document are continually active in innovations and experienced strong positive progress in volume of production (over 30 %) and earnings - profit (over 30 %) in research period. The analyses have shown that medium-sized and big industrial companies experienced growth up to 30 % of gross annual turnover meanwhile the costs fall up to 30 % during the examined period 2009-2011. Change in volume of production in the course of the period 2009-2011, there is significant correlation to change in gross annual turnover and change in earnings (profit) in the course of the research period. These finding can be interpreted as empirical confirmation of the reasonability of thorough strategic planning with respect to dynamics and innovation necessity. Strategic and innovative industrial companies apparently passed through the period of slow growth without substantial problems, which most likely suffered above all micro enterprises.