Conceptual Foundations of Evaluation and Forecasting of Innovative Development of Regions

The authors propose to assess and forecast the innovative development of regions using an improved methodological approach, which consists of substantiating statistical indicators of the innovative development, which are verified by correlation analysis (thereby avoiding autocorrelation between indicators of the innovative development of regions). Verification of the evaluation indicators makes it possible to determine the impact factors and the most influential indicators according to the integrated index of the innovative development of regions. Using the Bartlett method for modelling and making predictions makes it possible to take into consideration the impact of the most influential indicators on the values of the integral index, as well as to adjust the predicted values of the integral index. The calculated and forecasted integrated index of the innovative development of regions can be used by local authorities to develop measures that aim to intensify the innovative development of regions, taking into account the most influential factors for each region. The proposed methodological approach for estimating and forecasting the integrated index of the innovative development of regions was tested on the example of Polish voivodeships. To permit a more detailed consideration of the results obtained, three voivodeships, Kujawsko-Pomorskie, Pomeranian and Swiętokrzyskie, were studied and compared. The results showed that these voivodeships have different values on the integrated index, which can be attributed to different regions having different levels of innovation development. The most influential factors also differ for each of the regions.