Designing and creating a business model is crucial for a successful firm’s operation in today’s market in a complex and changing environment. A business model is the factor that differentiates one firm from another—it defines the distinctions of the firm, how the firm deals with the competition, the firms’ partnerships, and customer relations. This paper explores the role of the business model in the creation of sustainable competitive advantage. The empirical part of the paper presents the business model of three small companies from the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) industry in Croatia using the Business Model Canvas. Additionally, business model components were also analyzed using a framework for evaluating a business model. The results of the analysis point to a few crucial components of the business model, on which small ICT firms in Croatia build their competitive advantage by creating significant distinctions of those components. These distinctions are essential for their longevity and sustainability.

Entrepreneurship is defined as one of key lifelong competences and it represents ability to turn ideas into real projects. As such, it includes creativity, initiative, taking responsibility, taking risks, planning and managing projects. The development of entrepreneurial competences via formal education has become a priority for governments of a large number of European countries. Many EU documents emphasize the importance of investing into education that focuses on the development of entrepreneurial competences, as it directly affects students’ employment. However, this guideline represents a new challenge for the educational system – the need to change educational programs and organize them so that they influence the development of entrepreneurial competences, which enables students to become more employable and to cope with uncertainty, complexity and dynamics of the labor market. High unemployment rate of young people and challenges and demands of the labor market have led to a debate about the effectiveness and efficiency of educational programs at all levels. In this context, effectiveness and quality of vocational education and training (VET) are particularly important, since most vocational school students, after finishing secondary level, will not continue towards tertiary education, but will rather find themselves on the labor market. Therefore, vocational education should focus on the development of such skills (generic competences and vocational qualifications) that will correspond to the needs of the labor market, thus enabling easier and faster employment. The main purpose of this paper is to determine the extent to which vocational education contributes to development of students’ entrepreneurial competences. The data used in this paper comes from a survey that covered 1272 students from 15 secondary vocational schools in Osijek-Baranja County, one of the most underdeveloped regions in Croatia. The analysis of the results has shown that there is a positive correlation between extracurricular activities and entrepreneurial environment with the level of students’ entrepreneurial competences. No correlation between the formal educational program and the level of entrepreneurial competences has been found. The findings of this research may serve as the basis for the development of vocational education programs that would include and meet the labor market demands, thus increasing students’ employability.

Franchising is very popular growth model but despite the wide application of franchising in the developed countries of the world, its impact on the Croatian economy is still marginal. The purpose of this research is to identify the obstacles and challenges to a wider application of franchising in Croatia and generate policy recommendations for removing the identified obstacles. Obstacles and recommendations are identified on the basis of a conducted longitudinal qualitative research, the first phase of which was conducted in 2006, and second in 2014. The overall results of this research were presented in a form of PEST analysis and compared with the results of the 2006 research aiming to detect changes (improvements / deterioration) in individual areas of the research political, economic, legal and technologic factors of influence on the development of franchising in Croatia. Based on the detected changes, conclusions and policy recommendations were identified.The obstacles can be divided in two categories: franchising specific barriers and general business related obstacles for doing business in Croatia. Without removing most of these obstacles, it is unrealistic to expect high growth of franchising activities in Croatia in near future.

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Creating an external context that will have nourishing effect on the entrepreneurial activities seems to be timely, path and location dependent process. The systemic explorations of the national entrepreneurial context (environment) are still relatively underrepresented. The paper explores strengths and weaknesses of the national entrepreneurship conditions in Croatia and how stable these conditions are in the longer time frame. The aim of the study is to provide more detailed insight on the differences in perceptions among experts engaged in Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) and along the time. Findings indicate deterioration of the national entrepreneurial conditions in Croatia. Experts’ perceptions of national entrepreneurial conditions diverge between experts who have and those who do not have prior entrepreneurial experiences. The time also matters – perceptual difference in evaluating the quality of national entrepreneurship conditions is observed across 2015–2018.