摘要：The purpose of this paper is to highlight the importance of innovation in businesses in the context of a boarder meaning of innovation including social innovation and open innovation approaches. It focus also on the need that companies would have to invest in lifelong learning mostly with respect to the entrepreneurship education that can support creativity and innovation within any organization that aims for a short-run increase in their profits and mostly for a long-run sustainable competitive advantage. In the first part of the paper, we focus on companies.. According to the open innovation approach sharing ideas and knowledge can contribute a lot by generating more value added based on the increasing returns and positive network externalities. One person may generate 10 ideas; conversely, 5 persons may generate 50 ideas. From those 50 ideas the manager can use at least 3 of them. . This is how intangible assets in general and mostly intellectual capital and creativity should be enha nced. Furthermore, it will influence the consumers buying renewed products in a more profitable way. The second part of the paper highlights the importance of some best practices cases. Nowadays, with Internet banking, Euro Automatic Teller Machine (ATM) and credit cards, the final user has been granted options for the monetary transactions. People want their needs to be satisfied and this is one of the reasons why they have grown accustomed to demanding more and more from their banking services providers. In the last part of the paper, we discuss about the creativity models and ways in which these models might influence the workers and the lea ders to come up with new ideas, to be creative and to generate larger profits. From a methodological point of view the quantitative method (surveys) and the qualitative one (in terms of interviews) had been used.
关键词：business innovation; competitive advantage; open innovation; Internet banking; mobile banking solutions
