Mapping Europe's industrial research landscape
Research is a vital ingredient of Europe's innovation potential. In fact, R&D carried out by the private sector is a major contributor to the EU's ability to innovate its way towards more growth and jobs. Boosting the performance of private sector R&D necessitates a deep understanding of the industrial research landscape, its strengths, weaknesses, needs and investment gaps. Building this understanding requires reliable and timely statistics. The EU-funded 'Industrial research monitoring and analysis' (IRMA) project aimed to build just such an understanding. The project was run by the Institute for Prospective Technology Studies (IPTS) at the EU's Joint Research Centre (JRC). IRMA sought to provide policymakers, entrepreneurs and academics with robust empirical evidence and analysis of the contribution of private sector R&D to economic growth and employment. It continued to produce the Industrial R&D Investment Scoreboard, which has become a standard reference for business and policymakers. IRMA complemented this with a regular survey of companies on R&D developments. A corporate-level dataset containing R&D and financial information on the world's top research investors has proven to be a unique tool. It enabled IRMA to monitor and analyse the competitiveness of the research activities of firms based in Europe versus their main rivals. Scoreboard trends over the past decade show that firms in the United States dominate in high R&D-intensive sectors and EU companies in medium-high ones. The fact that EU firms tend to invest in sectors that are less research-intensive is partly responsible for the transatlantic private R&D investment gap. This finding is relevant to policymakers because, while under-investment can be addressed in the relatively short term, sectoral composition can only be changed in the long run. Econometric analysis using the scoreboard revealed that productivity and R&D investment are closely related. Meanwhile, age analysis shows the transatlantic research gap comes mostly from a relatively small number of young and innovative companies in sectors with high R&D intensity. Such deep statistical insights promise to help advance the understanding of the drivers of business R&D investment in Europe.