INNOVATIONS AS AN IMPORTANT COMPONENT IN THE SYSTEM OF ENVIRONMENTAL SUSTAINABILITY IN THE MANAGEMENT OF THE USE OF RESOURCE POTENTIAL IN THE REGIONS OF UKRAINE

Abstract

This article highlights the impact of innovation on achieving environmental sustainability of regional economic systems in the context of effective man-agement of significantly limited natural resources in modern Ukraine, which was the subject of the study, its key objective and main task. Methodology. The proposed work uses systemic and synergetic approaches, methods of analysis and synthesis, induction and deduction, historical and comparative analysis, etc. Value/originality. Consideration of the issues of regional innova-tion and environmental sustainability of regional economic systems in their combination is a novelty in modern studies of ecological-economic processes. It is exhaustively taken into account that innovation is a complex process of transformation of newly obtained ideas and goals into an actual object of eco-nomic relations. At the same time, it was found that in the conditions of trans-formation of the modern Ukrainian economy began to manifest such features as frequent and unpredictable changes in demand due to the emergence of completely new needs, which can be satisfied only by qualitatively new, pre-dominantly knowledge-intensive products. Therefore, there is an urgent need to restructure regional economies on a fundamentally new basis, which provides a real opportunity to reproduce the existing innovation potential, improve the innovation and technological level of all spheres of economic activity in the re-gion and achieve a much higher degree of competitiveness. At the same time, given the significant role of innovation processes in improving and ensuring the proper environmental sustainability of regional eco-nomic systems, the def-inition of appropriate tasks, taking into account their characteristics, is a pre-requisite for the effective management of natural resources of the country as a whole and its regions. Therefore, in European practice, the European Innova-tion Scoreboard (EIS), calculated by Eurostat, is used to determine the achieved level of regional innovation development. At the same time, the methodology used in its basis to assess the effectiveness of national research innovative projects is not without criticism. And one of the main criticisms was the absence of a conceptual or theoretical model of innovation. Simultane-ously, this paper proposes a fundamentally new approach to determining the effectiveness of innovation in the hierarchical-regional dimension, which is based on the use of appropriate tools of multidimensional statistical analysis and statistics of the European Union (in particular, Eurostat) and the State Statistics Service of Ukraine. In addition, synchronously with their standardi-zation, based on the obtained values of innovation levels in the regions, matri-ces were formed separately for incoming and outgoing regional innovation in-dices. Result. The achieved levels of innovativeness of Ukrainian regions in the context of ensuring appropriate environmental sustainability of their economic systems in the management of significantly limited natural resources were de-termined. Practical implications. Another real opportunity has arisen to signif-icantly improve the management of the available natural resources of each re-gion and the state as a whole in terms of ensuring the proper environmental sustainability of regional economic systems.