The role of banks’ innovativeness in building sustainable market efficiency: the case of Poland

New technology has already influenced almost all aspect of human life. Innovativeness is considered as one of the most important requirements for both companies and employees. Even such traditional entities like banks should develop their propensity and ability to incorporate changes in business practices through the creation and adoption of new ideas, solutions, and technology. Today, as a result of significant changes on banking markets, the innovativeness becomes one of the condition for banks’ sustainability. Strong competition increased by a necessity to compete with new market players requires developing new managers and employees’ skills as creativity and intrapreneurship. The purpose of the paper is to investigate to what extent bank’s innovativeness impacts a bank’s efficiency that lead to sustainable market position. It presents banks’ innovativeness among other competitive advantage factors, their assessment from the perspective of their potential in the process of building bank’s competitive advantage and a correlation between the level of bank’s innovativeness and market efficiency. The majority of the innovativeness research concentrate on developed countries and very little is known about developing, transition countries. Moreover, the few of them explore banks as a specific entity. On the banking market, they focus rather on distribution channels or product innovations. To the best authors’ knowledge, this is the first attempt to empirically examine the relationship between a bank’s innovativeness and market efficiency in a transition banking market in Europe. The paper uses data retrieved from the research survey. The survey’s target group consisted of all retail banks operating in Poland defined as banks that offer a broad range of financial services to different segments of individual customers. The research was conducted under the auspices of the Polish Banks Association. The data was collected by two methods – PAPI (personal and pencil interviews) and CAWI (computer assisted web interviews). The questionnaire was applied to executive managers of retail banks operating on Polish banking market and banks’ customers. The data used for assessing banks’ efficiency were derived from banks’ annual reports. The results provide direction for banks’ decision makers concerning innovativeness’ factors that should be taken into account in the process of building competitive advantage and sustainable market performance.