The furniture industry is an innovative industry that produces high added value products and its turnover is several billions of Euros in Europe, and there mainly work small and medium-sized enterprises (abbreviation – SMEs). Nowadays competitiveness is an essential factor for both a country and its enterprises in the process of dealing with changing market conditions. The global market is changing and for enterprises it is too hard to position themselves and find the way how to differ from other competitors. From 2006 until 2010 a Latvian furniture market value, numbers of employees and enterprises in the sector and its share in GDP has decreased. As a result, there are the serious challenges to be met and increase their competitiveness in domestic and export markets. The author has made an in-depth research into influencing competitiveness factors of SME micro level in the furniture manufacturing industry. The study objective was to identify the key internal factors which influence the SME of Latvian furniture manufacturers. The aim was to obtain an internal factor of competitiveness assessment of the 30 respondents by random sampling method and expert method of factor assessment. The enterprises need to constantly increase their competitiveness. The internal factors influencing the competitiveness of SMEs are connected with the products, manufacturing of products, financial situation, management and marketing activities. The competitiveness level of Latvia`s SMEs in the furniture manufacturing has been evaluated as average in 70% of cases. Only 27% of the enterprises show a good level of competitiveness.

The variety of study methods used at universities still is conservative and more pragmatic, but there is an increasing tendency to change study methodology to more and more student-centred and to focus on the students’ ability to become valuable workforce for SMEs. The necessity for development of study methods clearly demonstrates the research problem. At the same time, universities are facing pressure from governmental authorities to internationalize – student and teacher mobility, international partners and projects are highly recommended. The main process at universities is the study process. But also internationalization should support the study process and students in achieving practice-based learning outcomes. Facing these challenges, NOBANET network of universities has elaborated and piloted the study method Cross-Border Assignments (CBA) linking students’ future ability to successfully incorporate in the job market and the requirement for internationalization of studies. The aim of this article is to introduce and assess the CBA as a method to involve student work and students to engage in entrepreneurship problems. The authors have collected and analysed feedback of 10 CBAs implemented in 6 different universities. The feedback was received by using questionnaires with mainly closed questions. The results show that companies are satisfied with students’ work and they also appreciate teachers. The main conclusion about assessment of this method gives valuable contribution to scientific literature as a description of modern study method and good practice in linking HEIs and SMEs. Gratitude is expressed to the Nordic Council of Ministers for funding NOBANET project and project EKOSOC-LV, part 5.2.2. and INTERFRAME-LV.

Innovative activity of small and medium-sized enterprises is one of the factors for effective business. The aim of the article is to determine the innovative activities of small and medium-sized businesses in the frontier regions of Latvia (Latgale region), Lithuania (Vilnius region, Alytus region, Utena region, Panevezys region, Kaunas region), Belarus (Vitebsk region, Grodno region, Minsk region, Mogilev region). The novelty of the research has a cognitive character: the authors have determined the level of innovation potential for small and medium-sized enterprises in the regions, which is characterized by a complex of various resources, the amount of the production of innovative product and innovative technology, service in the regions, the branch structure of innovations in the regions, dominance of certain models of innovative entrepreneurship on the basis of innovative process organization in the companies located in the frontier regions has been established. The following methods are used for the research: logical analysis and synthesis, monographic and analytical method for studying economic theoretical and empirical sources of the international level, quantitative and statistical methods of data processing – frequency analysis, sampling; for the collection of the initial primary data the instrument of questionnaire was used.

Robotic process automation (RPA) is relatively new software technology that is quickly being adopted by companies around the globe to free office workers from routine, monotonous and rule-based tasks letting them invest their time in higher complexity and value tasks. While big companies have money, time and workforce resources to implement RPA, small and medium enterprises (SME) fall behind in their effort to start using RPA despite the fact that for this segment of organizations RPA would be useful as it presents the opportunity to re-arrange their limited resources and delegate part of work to software. To address this situation, the aim of this paper is to conduct systematic review of literature regarding RPA appliances in enterprises in order to find out how to implement RPA successfully, what processes to give to RPA, and how SMEs can implement RPA better. During the review main guidelines on how to implement RPA in enterprise in general and which processes to delegate to RPA in particular were identified as well as challenges RPA implementation might bring to company. It was also noted that there is missing research on how to adopt RPA specifically in SMEs segment. The conclusion is that SMEs aimed RPA implementation guidelines are missing.