Profitability is a universal relative parameter that characterizes the degree of efficiency of industrial, commercial or other economic activity, including in the field of natural resources use. In the most general form, the profitability of production shows the amount of profit that a business entity can receive or have received per unit of capital. At the same time, the cost of all consumed resources of the enterprise or organization is taken into account, regardless of the source of origin of this resource. It is this last condition that makes profitability a complex parameter, the formation of which depends on many factors.
In the classic version, the profitability of production is defined as a mathematical quantity, a coefficient representing the ratio of the amount of retained earnings to the value of the capital spent over a certain period. Thus, the conclusion follows logically that this parameter indirectly depends on other indicators of economic efficiency.
The comprehensive nature of the profitability indicator includes such constituent parameters as profitability of products, sales, profitability of fixed assets and assets, personnel profitability indicators and others. A special role in determining profitability is played by investment capital, which is characterized by the ratio of profit to the average borrowed capital for a certain period. Therefore, the general economic profitability of the enterprise, which operates under the conditions of implementing innovative investment projects, largely depends on the effectiveness of their implementation, because it is here, as a rule, that the bulk of investment capital is concentrated.
The effective implementation of investment projects largely depends on the quality of the innovation center, which can be created as an autonomous unit of the enterprise, or on the basis of any existing one.
The success of the innovation center is determined by the presence of personnel potential, able to offer new creative ideas and solutions or to find unconventional areas of application of already known solutions for the implementation of notational projects.
The study of creative ideas that determine the profitability of production shows that in most cases the patent fund is their source. Carrying out patent research allows you to identify areas, the level of technology achieved, select the most promising inventions and industrial designs that can become the basis for the development of competitive products or technologies or can be used as prototypes for creating new patentable solutions with high commercial potential.
Of great importance is the organization’s methodology for assessing the technical and economic significance of technical solutions for the selection of innovative projects in terms of their successful commercialization and the conditions that make production profitable. whether this shows or not, the real dependence of innovative success on profitability is widely reflected in modern economic literature. In the works of a number of authors, the significance of technical solutions is proposed to be characterized by such indicators as the degree of novelty, prospects, manufacturability, expected effect, conditions of implementation, etc. Each of the characteristics is presented in the form of a system of indicators that gives an expert assessment in points. It is obvious that it is possible to assess the impact of inventions and other decisions on the achievement of the expected technical and economic parameters if there is a ranked list of such indicators for a particular object. That is, all these indicators are practically comparable with those used to analyze the overall effectiveness of economic activity. In this case, the profitability of production shows how efficiently the investment capital used to implement innovative projects is used, and can be considered as a component reflecting the overall profitability.
In foreign practice (USA, Canada, etc.), a system of preliminary assessment of innovations based on a multi-criteria approach is widely used. In the USA, for example, in 1988 a special law on technological responsibility was adopted and a national service for the technical evaluation of innovations was created. The main criteria for selecting promising innovations are market parameters: dynamics of demand for a particular product, assessment of market risk, state of competition, required investments and profitability, including.