INTRODUCTION Innovation is becoming an everyday topic not only in Slovakia, but all over the world. Through innovation, companies are trying to gain a competitive advantage on the market and to provide to the customer something new, to create his previous unknown needs. However, many enterprises solve their innovations by the current ideas of their managers, not by systematically managing of business processes. In this way, they deprive themselves of many ideas, either from employees or by gaining from continuous management of innovation processes. This reason was the impetus to the dissertation research, in which the shortcomings were revealed and the process for managing innovation ideas and achieving higher innovation performance of the enterprise was described. Innovation is very popular nowadays. We see it as a key action for achieving a 21st century business climate. All businesses have to be innovative, as this is the only way to ensure their longevity, their ability to be competitive and, to ensure their future incomes as well. Most businesses, especially small and medium-sized ones, do not always realise that innovation is not the exclusive privilege of high-tech companies, but that every individual, every business, in every sector, can be innovative. Innovation is a process that can be learned. The importance of innovation constantly grows, whether in the context of globalisation, the increasing number of enterprises at home and abroad,by research in various fields. Innovation is a useful tool to help businesses to respond better to changes in the internal and external environment, save business costs, increase efficiency and achieve business objectives. For businesses to be successful in the long term, it is inevit-able to use their innovation potential to the full. Problems often arise, which are often encountered by enterprises, namely: insufficient use of innovation opportunities of Slovak companies, the absence of a comprehensive model for the creation and management of innovation processes, the absence of a coherent systematic methodology for the creation and management of innovation processes. Especially here the space is created for the proposal of a model for the creation and management of inno-vation processes in the enterprise, which will help enterprises to en-sure more effective working with innovation to help increase competitiveness and keep moving forward. An important part of managing the innovation process is establishing the elements of an innovation climate, through which innovative ideas from employees are encouraged and their dissemination and implementation are promoted. These must be managed on the basis of the type of organisational structure chosen for the enterprise. By getting the right elements of the innovation climate and aligning them with the organisational structure, enter-prises can manage their processes and get more innovative ideas to be implemented, thereby increasing their innovation performance and achieving better competitiveness in the market. By managing processes, enterprises expand the knowledge and skills of their employees and make better use of their potential. The management of the innovation process should provide businesses the basic steps to progress successfully and achieve an increased number of applied innovation ideas. In the conditions of the Slovak market, it remains a question whether companies can create the conditions for employees to be willing to share their knowledge and provide the company their abilities and skills, and the company has the opportunity to develop their potential. Without this, it is not possible to ensure innovative ideas, which, if managed, will bring innovation to the enterprise. There are many new ideas, but only if value is created from them do they become innovations. Innovation is sometimes based on an existing idea, concept or product and its improvement. A company achieves strategic advantages mainly when it is a leader of changes, the only way to achieve this is to be innovative. One of the possible ways to improve the success of a company, is to produce products of the highest quality and as quickly as possible at the lowest costs, is to improve individual processes, i.e. to innovate them.

INTRODUCTION Today, characterised by massive competition and market in-stability, innovation and its proper management are the foundation of a company's success. They help it to maintain a competitive ad-vantage and cope with the ever-changing environment in which it operates. We can therefore argue convincingly that innovation is the driving force behind the development of every company today. It is precisely because of the importance of innovation that more and more economists began to focus on this topic at the beginning of the 19th century. The most important of these was Joseph Schumpeter, who laid the foundations for the science of innovation. His basic idea was simple. Entrepreneurs and businesses will pursue innovation if it gives them a strategic competitive advantage. It is this basic idea that has gained in importance over time and has become the hallmark of all businesses that are now in the limelight. The accelerating dynamics of the market environment, globalization, increasing customer demands and the development of information technology are forcing all business entities to seek new methods to increase their competitiveness. The global economic crisis, which has hit almost all sectors at the speed of light, has also affected the change in business principles and the way many enterprises are managed. While until recently most top managers focused their attention on improving the quality of production, transforming processes and maximising sales of their products, recently there have been fundamental changes in the evolutionary spiral of managerial thinking and behaviour. The original, practice-tested ideas of customer orientation from the period before the introduction of mass production are coming back from oblivion and in a new quality represent the next stage in the historical development of marketing management theory. Building a long-term relationship with customers was an obvious part of the seller's behaviour in the early stages of the com-pany's development. Later, during the Industrial Revolution era, individual customers unique in their needs blended into the anonymous crowd of the mass market. In the new economic reality, the marketing paradigm, characterized by the orientation of enter- prises towards customers, their satisfaction, loyalty and value, is in-creasingly finding application in concrete corporate and managerial practice. The marketing mix is one of the basic marketing tools for managing a company's marketing. It serves not only to develop business activi-ties, but also to raise awareness of the brand and products that are unfamiliar to the company. Innovation management is a relatively new direction of mana-gement. The concept is widely used because science, technology and innovation have become a key factor in economic strategies and competition in markets in developed countries. Innovation manage-ment is associated with the professional implementation of the management function primarily at the enterprise level. In particular, it should be stressed that innovation management has an organic link with the phenomena that once gave rise to the concept of strategic management. It studies a number of special laws and requirements for the management of modern corporations and business develop-ment. The period of the current economy can be considered as a stage in which the use of classical methods has become something common, ordinary and often times ineffective. Every single organisation is exposed to changes in the environment and pressure from competitors. With the accession of the Slovak Republic to the European Union, our economy is undergoing a further transfor-mation in a short space of time, and therefore the conditions for doing business have become even more complicated. It is therefore essential that adequate methods are adapted to such conditions. Methods that are briefly referred to as modern methods. An organisation that wants to maintain its position on the market, or even improve it, must implement these modern methods.