Abstract:

This article proposes to consider the education system as a factor in the formation of people’s personal values. We examine students’ perceptions of the degree to which existing educational standards are oriented towards the formation and development of personal values, as well as formulate proposals for the implementation of a systems approach to the development of educational standards as a factor in improving the existing complex of personal values. The methodology applied included: desk analysis by comparison, deduction, and induction; a questionnaire study; variance, discriminant, factor and morphological analysis. Respondents were segmented according to the criteria “presence of groups of values” — “conjugation of groups of values with variables.” University students, i.e., the part of society that is considered the most active and progressive, were found to have a low level of moral and ethical values. After considering the place of education in the macro-environment of the country was substantiated, we propose a number of measures to address the problem of raising the level of values among all participants in the educational process, in order to reduce the gap between the pace of technical advancement and humanitarian development of society.

Abstract:

One of the important and open issues in modern businesses is the financing of research and development (R&D) activities, treated as an instrument of research and development policy. Maintaining the competitiveness of business entities requires the systemic creation and implementation of innovations, which requires expenditure on R&D activities. The aim of this paper is to identify the level, dynamics and structure of expenditures on R&D activities in Poland and in Polish businesses. The time range of the study covers the years 2015–2019 (or 2017–2019 inthe analysis of expenditures in the enterprise sector), the scope concerns the financial aspects of R&D activity on a national scale and in the sector of Polish enterprises, and the sources of the data for analysis are publications of Poland’s Central Statistical Office (Statistics Poland). The study applied the following methods: a critical and cognitive analysis of literature in identifying the research problem, a descriptive and comparative method in presenting the problem, a statistical method in calculating percentage shares, and a projection method in proposing model solutions. Overall, the analysis found a relatively low level and dynamics of expenditures incurred on R&D in Poland and in the enterprise sector. Therefore, R&D policy among Polish enterprises can be described as conservative and ad hoc in nature.

Abstract:

The aim of this paper is to conceptualize Design Thinking and customer experience management (CEM), to situate the use of the Design Thinking method in customer experience management processes and to present its practical application based on a case study from the financial services industry — the trade credit insurer, Euler Hermes Poland, Towarzystwo Ubezpieczeń S.A. This article is an attempt to identify actionable Design Thinking process elements and tools and their intersections with the components of the Customer Experience Management processes.

Abstract:

This study experimentally evaluated Polish school students’ competence at written communication, understood as one of the forms of social communication. The task, performed online, was designed to see if the students were able to select the most important information from a given base text and to compose new texts on this basis to comply with three different length requirements, and how they behaved under the pressure of the time allocated to complete the sub-tasks. Results from an overall pool of 500 secondary school students from a diverse sample of schools (in the city of Poznań and the surrounding Wielkopolska province) that differed in terms of type and ranking suggest an overall poor competence at various composite skills involved in written social communication: information selection, summarization, logical structuring, and cohesive embellishment. Participants clearly exhibited various problems with concisely formulating thoughts, properly complying with instructions, etc. Composing a short, written message (based on a provided base text) and/or freely embellishing and reformulating information clearly caused them considerable difficulty. The article closes with some suggestions for how the methods used could potentially be improved in future studies of this type.

Abstract:

This article examines the concept of organizational maturity, with particular emphasis on the importance that it can play in medical tourism. First, the concept of organization is subjected to an interdisciplinary interpretation in the light of the Polish and international literature on the subject. The influence of this area of enterprise management on the decisions made and the shaping of the pro-quality policy of the enterprise is considered – noting that the continuous and comprehensive improvement of intra-organizational processes, decisions taken and monitored, and long-term planning are determinants of the level of organizational maturity and contribute to the implementation of planned activities, while effectively responding to the needs of stakeholders. Next, selected results of a qualitative study conducted among selected private medical institutions specializing in medical tourism are presented. Despite the relatively rich literature in the field of tourist and medical services, few studies have looked at the importance of quality in management in private healthcare entities and its significant impact on the purchasing decisions of tourist patients, with a simultaneous emphasis on entities serving foreign medical patients. The survey was carried out in 2021 using the IDI (Individual in-depth Interview) technique, with a purposive sample of Polish and Croatian clinics providing services in the field of medical tourism holding a significant position in their respective market.