A multiplicative structure in the cohomological version of Conley index is described following a joint paper by the author with K. Gęba and W. Uss. In the case of equivariant flows we apply a normalization procedure known from equivariant degree theory and we propose a new continuation invariant. The theory is applied then to obtain a mountain pass type theorem. Another illustrative application is a result on multiple bifurcations for some elliptic PDE.