Financial aspects of innovative business in Latvia: Opportunities, problems, solutions

According to the Lisbon strategy, innovation is a key tool in order to improve the EU's competitiveness. Innovation development is recognized as important goal also in Latvia's National Development Plan. One of the important aspects in order to ensure successful development of innovative business is financial basis of such activities. The EU goal is to increase R&D expenditures up to 3% of GDP until 2010. This is important challenge for many EU countries, also for Latvia. Therefore, the goal of this paper is to analyse financial aspects of innovative business in Latvia, discovering opportunities, problems and solutions of these problems. Results of the analysis show that despite of positive tendencies in financing of innovative activities, Latvia is still behind almost all EU countries in terms of R&D expenditures. The results of analysis point on many factors that impact financial environment for innovative business in Latvia. These factors also are analysed in the paper.