Publications
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PDF The 2022 EU Survey on Industrial R&D Investment Trends
This report presents the results of the 2022 survey of the top 1 000 EU companies by R&D investment in 2020,… Show more conducted between June and September 2022. The survey is intended to provide insights into the research and development activities of the R&D investors listed in the 2021 EU Industrial R&D Investment Scoreboard (Scoreboard 2021). The objective of this survey is to gather future expectations for R&D investment and gain first-hand information on barriers and drivers and the role of various activities that influence the level and direction of R&D investment. The survey addresses financing and collaboration, technology transfer and open innovation, and the effects of COVID-19 and the war in Ukraine. The response rate stood at 12%. The number of responses increased by 31.5% compared to the previous year, and the respondents accounted for over 26% of the R&D investment of the top 1 000 EU corporate investors in R&D. The results show a strong recovery in R&D investment after the COVID-19 pandemic, and the respondents expect this positive development to continue in 2022 and 2023. The main drivers of R&D investment are environmental sustainability and digitalisation. The respondents’ capital investment is largely driven by technologies to reduce emissions and to adapt to Industry 4.0. The survey thus confirms that innovative EU companies are actively helping to meet the targets set out in the European Green Deal and the green and digital transformation (the Twin Transition). Show less
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PDF The 2022 EU Industrial R&D Investment Scoreboard
The main objective of the EU Industrial R&D Investment Scoreboard (the Scoreboard) is to benchmark the performance of EU innovation-driven… Show more industries against major global counterparts and to provide an R&D investment database that companies, investors and policymakers can use to compare individual company performances against the best global competitors in their sectors. The 2022 edition of the Scoreboard analyses the 2500 companies that invested the largest sums in R&D worldwide in 2021. These companies, with headquarters in 41 countries, and more than 900k subsidiaries all over the world, each invested over EUR 48.5 million in R&D in 2021. The total investment across all 2500 companies was EUR 1093.9 billion - an amount equivalent to 86% of the world’s business-funded R&D and passing the trillion Euro mark for the first time. The top 2500 includes 361 companies based in the EU, accounting for 17.6% of total R&D investment, 822 US companies (40.2%), 678 Chinese companies (17.9%), 233 Japanese companies (10.4%) and 406 from the rest of the world (RoW, 13.9% of R&D). The RoW group comprises companies from South Korea (53), Switzerland (55), UK (95), Taiwan (84) and companies based in a further 18 countries. At the global level, the Scoreboard shows the deepening of the global tech race in the four key sectors which account for more than three-quarters of the total Scoreboard R&D: ICT producers (22.6%), health industries (21.5%), ICT services (19.8%) and automotive (13.9%). R&D growth in the four key sectors was higher for US and Chinese than for EU Scoreboard companies. The extended sample of 1000 EU companies contains a substantial number of small- and medium-sized enterprises in health and ICT sectors with encouraging trends in 2021. This good base is an excellent enabler of the New European Innovation Agenda, which inter alia addresses firm creation and growth in emerging technologies and triggering spillovers between sectors. This report analyses companies' R&D, patents and other financial performance indicators over recent years, focusing on the comparative performance of EU companies and their global counterparts. A patent-based positioning of companies in green technologies (low-carbon technologies in energy-intensive industries and circular economy technologies) shows that EU and US Scoreboard companies lead in high-value patents, and the EU also leads in inventions relevant to circularity. Moreover, the present Scoreboard also analyses firm-level scores summarizing company performance in relevant UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). EU-based Scoreboard companies achieved the highest scores in most SDGs and showed progression across the board. From a sectoral perspective, Scoreboard companies operating in the automotive and chemical sectors achieved on average high SDG progression. The results of this report reveal challenges and opportunities for the EU as it seeks to improve its technology capabilities and reinvigorate its industrial base in the context of increasing global competition pressure and ongoing green and digital transformations. Show less
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Exploratory study understanding the SDG alignment along research activities and technological innovation of Scoreboard companies
This study work aims at improving the GLORIA project’s understanding of the alignment between private firms’ research, development & technological… Show more innovation (RD&TI) activities and SDGs. To accomplish such a goal, textual descriptions of single RD&TI records produced by the companies featured in the scoreboard will be analysed by means of different Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques and classified in accordance with potential SDG of interest. Specifically, patent descriptions, publication abstracts and summaries of research projects funded by the European commission via the H2020 Framework Programme are analysed (see chapter 2. Data Sources) and linked with potential SDGs of concern by means of keyword-based and Deep Learning textual classifiers. Show less
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PDF Top EU R&D investors in the global economy - Benchmarking technological capabilities in the health industry
This report analyses the health industry through the lens of the top 2,500 corporate R&D investors worldwide, coupling R&D and… Show more patent analysis to provide new evidence on the EU specificities with respect to other main economic areas. During the last 10 years R&D investments in the biotech sector have increased by a factor of 3.6, increasing its prominence in the health industry. However, biotech and pharma companies present similar technological portfolios, whit pharma companies owning more biotechnology patents. Focusing too much on the lack of EU biotech companies among top corporate R&D investors might overemphasize a potential gap with the US in the development of biotechnologies. In this work we identify a set of technologies related to immunology, immunotherapy, bioinformatics and combinatorial chemistry – Immuno+ technologies – and show that these are complex and increasingly pervasive. The gap with the US is large and a sense of urgency would help the EU jump into this new technological wave. The key question for EU policy makers is how to foster the overall development of the health and biotech innovation system in the EU. Understanding where, how and what type of research is performed in the EU compared to other economic areas is of great importance. This report provides insights that can support the ongoing revision of the general pharmaceutical legislation on medicines for human use. However, more evidence is needed to evaluate and implement the new healthcare industrial and innovation policies in the years to come. Disentangling the role played by large R&D investors in the EU innovation system and the interactions between private and public research activities seems to be particularly relevant as concerns the health industry. Show less
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The development of digital sustainability technologies by top R&D investors
The report offers a novel approach to identify patents associated with digital sustainability technologies, which combine components of digital technologies… Show more with technologies that are relevant for climate change mitigation or adaption. We propose an identification strategy based upon six search modules, which combine specialists’ opinion, keywords and classification-based approaches. We generate two datasets. For the first, we use PATSTAT 2019a to identify 319,243 patents associated with digital sustainability technologies. We use this dataset to evaluate the accuracy of the proposed strategy in finding technologies that combine both a digital and a sustainable aspect. We find an accuracy above 95.5% for all search modules implemented in the proposed strategy. For the second dataset, we implement the proposed strategy to update the results using PATSTAT 2021b. To make the results more comparable to the EU climate neutrality report 2021 edition, we focus on the period from 2016 to 2018 and filter priority patents using the IP5 strategy. We link the retrieved patents to R&D Scoreboard companies using the JRC-OECD COR&DIP© v.3 dataset. We identify for all R&D Scoreboard companies 325,508 patents in total, from which 5,057 are digital sustainability patents. Show less
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PDF Where the EU stands vis-à-vis the USA and China? Corporate R&D intensity gap and structural change
Industrial innovation has always been key in the European Union (EU) to achieving competitive sustainability. Its role has become even… Show more more crucial in the context of COVID-19 recovery plans, the implementation of the twin green and digital transition, and the global sustainability agenda.1 Investments in research and development (R&D) by private sector companies drive industrial innovation. An analysis of differences in R&D intensity across world regions and their development over time is therefore of particular relevance. We examine the trends of the EU’s overall corporate R&D intensity relative to competing economies. Our findings reveal that the R&D intensity gap has changed over the last decade, and we explore to what extent the EU economy’s sectoral composition compared with that of its main competitors, the United States and China, has influenced this change. Our analysis covers 10 years (2012–2021) and is based on company data that is freely accessible on the EU Industrial R&D Investment Scoreboard website. Show less
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PDF Technological relatedness and industrial transformation: Introduction to the Special Issue
This article introduces eleven research articles that connect concepts of technological relatedness and diffusion with the transformation of industrial and… Show more innovation systems. These studies focus on the role of knowledge spillovers, regional variations in innovation and performance, and the evolution of new technologies, such as green and digital technologies. Regional capabilities and ability to diversify are key in accelerating the transformation process of existing industries Taken all together, these studies suggest that industrial transformation hinge on firms capability to absorb domestic or foreign knowledge, regions capabilities, development trajectories, and their ability to network. In particular, regions capacity to diversify and leverage existing related knowledge are key in accelerating the green and digital transformation process of existing industries. Show less
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PDF Corporate Venturing for R&I: Practitioner’s views and policy questions
Recognising the increasing role that corporate venturing (CV), in general, and corporate venture capital (CVC), in particular, play in company… Show more innovation strategies, the European Commission organised on 23rd May 2022 a workshop with CVC practitioners to better understand the features of and rationales for CVC / CV and the role public policy could play to facilitate its expansion. The workshop confirms the Growing Phenomenon of CV in Europe; an increasing number of recurring CVC investors and growing investments, reaching 14.5b$ in 2019 from 3.6b$ in 2013. Despite this increase, CVC investments in start-ups are still modest with regard to the overall size of the VC market. They are modest also with regard to the corporate’s investment in internal R&D, representing about 2,6% of the sum spent on corporate R&D. In line with the overall venture capital (VC) market, corporate VC is also less mature in the EU than in the USA. The panel discussed options to improve this situation, geared to create an efficient pan-European market for cross-border deals, such as promoting VC networks, improving the visibility of start-ups (particularly outside the country of the headquarters of the mother company) or measures to strengthen linkages between start-ups and corporates at early stages. Show less
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PDF Top R&D investors recovering fast from the Covid-19 crisis: Preliminary insight to the 2022 EU Industrial R&D Investment Scoreboard
This policy brief presents preliminary insight in the 2022 EU Industrial R&D Investment Scoreboard (the Scoreboard). It is based on… Show more a subsample of companies with available published accounts for the year 2021. The subsample consists of 678 companies representing 66.5% of the global R&D in the previous year’s Scoreboard. It includes 274 companies based in the EU, 198 in US, 112 Chinese companies, 16 Japanese companies and 78 from the rest of the world. Show less
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The regional green potential of the European innovation system
The brief provides an overview of green technological development across European regions employing the Economic Fitness Complexity approach to establish… Show more a green technology space. The study explores the associations between comparative advantage in specific technological domains and a region’s capacity to develop green technologies, i.e. its Green Fitness. Furthermore, it addresses the interaction between the green and non-green knowledge bases, with a particular focus on whether regional know-how in the non-green technological realm can be exploited in the green domain and vice versa. To this aim, a metric of regional Green Potential is proposed. The analysis suggests that regions specialised in green domains, irrespective of their complexity, have a higher propensity to develop technologies connected with green technologies. Green technologies are linked mostly to technologies related to the production or transformation of materials; with engines and pumps; and with construction methods. The regions with the highest Green Potential are not necessarily those with the highest Green Fitness. The results suggest that there is a potential for green and non-green technological advances to generate positive spillovers in terms of capabilities to produce innovations across the spectrum of technological complexity. Show less