Today we are surrounded by large infrastructure projects that affect many areas of our lives: subways, bridges, railways and highway construction, the building of residential communities. Large enterprises start projects to develop new products and services and then put them on the market. The term “project” is the word used most often with regard to the planning, organizing and hosting of international sporting and cultural events. The culture of projects has spread rapidly in the last few years among small- and medium-sized enterprises and the public sector in the member states of the European Union, along with project management.
The purpose of projects is to contribute to the realization of organizational and regional development strategies and goals. The realization of organizational strategic goals affects the external environment in which the organization operates. The main challenge both for the top- and project managers is to be able to respond to the needs of the external environment, and this depends on how these needs are identified, and neeeds are becoming more closely related to sustainability and innovation. From a different perspective, the concept of sustainability and innovation is linked to project management. There are several approaches in this field, some of which try to discover the relationship between project management, sustainability, and innovation.
The aim of the research is to develop a model to assess how projects become successful by contributing to the realization of strategic goals and to local and regional development.
The main focus is on the following key areas:
- Sustainability: the aim is to reveal how projects contribute to organizational, local and regional economic and social development, as well as to environmental protection.
- Innovation: the aim is to discover the innovation potential of projects and to analyze how different forms of innovation contribute to organizational, local and regional economic and social development as well as to environmental protection.
- Creativity: the aim is to explore how sustainability and innovation are supported by the degree, extent and intensity of individual, organizational and social creativity.