2018 has been a positive year for investments in R&D which registered a growth up to € 823.4 billion meaning +8.9 % compared to the 2017 data. The main contributors were the US with 38% of total R&D, the EU (25.3%), Japan (13.3%), China (11.7%), South Korea (3.8%) and Switzerland (3.5%). These are among the main findings of the 2019 edition of the EU Industrial R&D Investment Scoreboard published by the European Commission built on a dataset consisting of the 2500 companies based in 44 countries which invested more in R&D in 2018/19.
With regard to the sectors, the ICT services (17%) and the ICT producers 8.2%) are the ones that contributed more to the global R&D growth, while the lowest growth was registered in the Aerospace & Defence sector (4%).
The Scoreboard also highlights that the industrial R&D is also playing an important role in reaching the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and an example is related to the fact that technologies such as artificial intelligence, biotechnology, clean energy generation and storage technologies are contributing to meet most of the SDGs.
Furthermore this year’s edition includes a patent analysis showing that the top R&D investors own 50% of patents filed in the European Patent Office and in the US Patent and Trademark Office from 2012 and 2015. The Scoreboard also highlights that EU companies register competitive advantages in most green technologies and that, while Toyota has the most green patents, the top 25 global companies by number of green patents are EU firms namely Bosch, Volkswagen, Airbus and Rolls-Royce.
Discover more highlights by reading the Scoreboard downloadable here.
Source: The European Commission
