Martin Mičiak

This article focuses on risks while supporting creativity. This represents a knowledge gap that is addressed. The employees’ creativity is desired, but there is often no approach process to its support. The implementation is affected by risks needed to be managed. The aim was to create a mechanism for managing risks within the support of creativity in organizations, including commercial companies and others, e.g., sports clubs. Content analysis, case studies, questionnaire surveys, or models were applied. The results combined secondary (cases) and primary data (survey with two groups of respondents). The findings showed that when creativity is supported, people are willing to increase their performance (50% of academicians, 88.78% of students). The process is negatively affected by the lack of managerial skills and the interconnectedness of processes. Organizations should increase their managers’ skills. A proactive approach to risk prevention leads to continuous improvement. A procedure was selected when the potential of applying findings from the academic environment to other organizations was identified. A generalization of the findings was performed so that the research results can be applied in different environments after considering their specificities. The recommendations include the process for supporting creativity, the identification of risks, and the risk management mechanism.

Human capital (HC) is a key factor for enterprises’ performance and competitiveness. The aim of this study was to identify how enterprises in Slovakia perceive the impact of the investments in HC on business performance within the context of the implementation of human capital management (HCM). The content analysis was applied to analyze the different authors’ opinions on the substance of HC. These opinions were compared, and the knowledge obtained was synthesized. The article’s originality stems from the evaluation of the results from a unique questionnaire survey conducted with a specific focus on IT companies. This follows the presumption that these companies approach the application of HCM in an exemplary way, while being considered knowledge intensive. To collect the primary data, a questionnaire survey was performed in 113 Slovak IT enterprises and its results were analyzed using statistical tests of independence. The main findings include the corroboration of a positive effect of investments in the employees’ education and the implementation of HCM on the enterprises’ performance. Despite this, more than a third of the enterprises did not evaluate the effectiveness of investment in HC, and more than half of enterprises did not have the HCM concept implemented. Several solutions are recommended with respect to the HR managers’ training.