This article aims to argue the importance of innovations and their impact on ensuring the sustainable development of the economy. The article addresses the openness of economies to innovation and involves complex multidimensional research of different sources in the literature that studies the openness to the innovation of different countries and the expenditures allocated to support innovation, addressing innovation management issues specific to small businesses. The scientific novelty of the article consists in researching the correlation between research and development expenditure expressed in the form of their share in gross domestic product and adjusted net national income per capita. A separate line of research is to examine the opening up of emerging countries, which often face the problem of insufficient financial resources to allocate them to innovation. This problem becomes even more pressing if we take account of the specific structure of the economy in which small business enterprises dominate, with a significant share of the family business, for which the financing of innovation activities becomes even more problematic. The basic ideas in this article are managed in this way, as to argue the need for cooperation of the business environment with higher education institutions involved in research-development-innovation activities based on technology transfer.This article was made within the project of National Agency for Research and Development, Government of Republic of Moldova, no. 20.80009.0807.22, "Development of the mechanism for forming the circular economy in the Republic of Moldova".