An introduction to the theme "Financing of the Creation of Original Literary Work at the Nightfall of Paper Books". Author prefers the direct model of payment for various ways of use of literary work and names some pitfalls of the highly enforced indirect financing models.

Competitive Intelligence is gathering, analyzing and plotting information about competitors, products and customers. These methods are used to evaluate strengths and weaknesses of competitors. Competitive Intelligence is an ethical and legal business practice. In the Czech Republic a new project called Portál CI (www.portalci.cz) has been launched at Masaryk University. It serves as a platform for competitive intelligence professional and students. It provides access to a number of expert articles, methods, instructions and interviews.

Every age brings opportunities and threats, only ones who can match these challenges are successful. Tools for Competitive Intelligence (CI) help them to identify threats and opportunities, understand their nature and use it for their own benefit.

The economic crisis more or less affects all world economies. Sooner or later, it will hit most businesses. Some of them will not manage this situation and will close the business, others with sill survive with larger or smaller losses. On the other hand, some companies will use the crisis to consolidate their position on the market and many new businesses will start, because the crisis is an opportunity to come up with new ideas.

The right information at the right time is the key to business success. In times of crisis, it is doubly true. Professional tools for CI help to effectively process the information inside and outside the company. Tools for CI enable finding individual pieces of information giving them into the context and using them to obtain the competitive advantage. Company than can choose the right strategy for the prevention of threats and seek and exploit new opportunities. CI tools are used mainly in the sales protection (for the verification and monitoring of companies and individuals) and fort the protection of corporate assets and intellectual property (risk assessment and fraud detection). CI tools allow to increase productivity through fast access to information and also to identify new opportunities and to gain competitive advantage using tools for mapping the market.

This article considers the function of a library in knowledge economy of information society from macro- and microeconomical perspective. It includes a brief analysis of impact of macroeconomical factors on libraries. The article gives an overview of ways how libraries can be funded and how they can efficiently market their services.

The article introduces an important statistical benchmarking tool of European Union innovation performance – the European Innovation Scoreboard (EIS). An introduction of the article informs about economic and political reasons of establishing EIS and about an influence of chosen factors on development of its content. The main part of the article characterizes a general concept of the European Innovation Scoreboard from two points of view:
1) Innovation performance indicators and their structure
2) Basic presentation forms of results of innovation performance measurement
The conclusion presents a development of the European Innovation Scoreboard. Special attention is devoted to newly analysed areas that influence the performance of the national innovation systems.
Článek představuje významný statistický nástroj benchmarkingu inovační výkonnosti Evropské unie – Evropský inovační zpravodaj (European Innovation Scoreboard, EIS). V úvodu seznamuje s hospodářskými a politickými důvody jeho vytvoření a s vlivem uvedených faktorů na vývoj jeho obsahu. Hlavní část textu charakterizuje obecnou koncepci Evropského inovačního zpravodaje:
1) z hlediska zahrnutých indikátorů inovační výkonnosti a jejich strukturace;
2) z hlediska základních forem prezentace výsledků měření inovační výkonnosti.
Závěr je věnován vývoji Evropského inovačního zpravodaje, především nově analyzovaným oblastem, ovlivňujícím výkonnost národních inovačních systémů.

This article focuses on an evaluation of marketing methods used in a publicly-funded library (State Technical Library) and a private company (Medistyl Ltd.). Thanks to a specific questionnaire and conducted personal interview, we have compared and contrasted these two institutions in respect to a variety of aspects, e. g. the so called 'marketing mix', SWOT analysis, and others. As a result, we have obtained a general approach of these organizations to the marketing overall. Although these results cannot be extended to other institutions, we hope this paper will demonstrate all important features that these bodies have in common, as well as their significant differences.