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The aim of the paper is to find out which competencies, and to what extent, are responsible for creating and implementing innovation supporting measures by the local self‐government authorities (NUTS4 and NUTS5), as well as the level of efficiency of these competencies. In the current literature, there is a visible lack of studies devoted to the relations between competencies and the performance of local authority representatives in improving local companies’ innovativeness. However, these measures seem to be important to the companies’ development. A total of 72 selfgovernments in a modest innovative region were interviewed quantitatively and qualitatively. An exploratory factor analysis was used to discover structures among 45 competency components, and 14 independent factors (unrelated competencies) were found. The results show that competencies can be divided into a few groups, concerning the preparatory, organising and supporting stage of competitiveness and support of innovativeness. It was possible to confirm two hypotheses. First, the auxiliary hypothesis, which concerns causative relations between the competencies of local authority representatives (inputs) and measures supporting the competitiveness and innovativeness of local companies (outputs), was confirmed using a test of significance. Although the analysis revealed the strong statistical significance of the relations between competency components and outputs, the real value of the competency set would be the positive impact on the given output. Thus, the second hypothesis assumes that the higher the level of local authorities’ competencies, the greater the intensity of local measures supporting the competitiveness and innovativeness of local companies will be. This was tested with correlation coefficients. Surprisingly, only two competencies have a real and visible impact on the outputs: institutionally oriented competency, which refers to the ability to create entities that support local companies, and procedurally oriented competency, which refers to the ability to meet the companies’ needs. Nevertheless, because there are more relations with statistical significance between other competencies and outputs, there is no evidence that the other competencies are useless. Likely, they are valid as a sine qua non condition. The results also revealed a complexity of outputs, which means that authorities must be more sophisticated in obtaining and using
competency components to achieve complex outputs. This supports the hypothesis that there may be some stages in the development of the competencies of local authorities, which can be investigated further. The results are significant for all local authorities of similar communities and can be used for the deliberate acquisition of competence, and thus, to improve the quality of measures supporting entrepreneurs and the creation of a convenient environment for innovation.
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