Innovation in the business enterprise sector 2012-2014

This report details the results from the ninth regular Norwegian business enterprise innovation survey, covering the period 2012-2014. The survey is carried out biannually as a part of the pan-European Community Innovation Survey (CIS) 2014, which is coordinated by the statistics agency of the European Union (Eurostat).

Most countries collect data on R&D and innovation separately, while some – including Norway – have previously integrated them in a single combined survey. In part due to concerns over international comparability, Statistics Norway carried out an “off-year” innovation survey Norway for the period 2011-2013 which was conducted separate from the R&D survey.

The key purposes of this survey was to assess the impact of this methodological change for the business enterprise sector as a whole, as well as to serve as a new reference point should the R&D and innovation surveys be split from each other. These results showed clear and significant differences in the results between carrying out the CIS separately and integrating it with the business enterprise R&D survey. A notably higher share of enterprises reported having had innovation or innovation activities in the 2011-2013 survey than has been reported in previous combined surveys.

Hence, it was decided that future Norwegian innovation survey would be carried out separate from the R&D survey starting with CIS 2014. As a consequence of this, there is a break in the time series of the Norwegian innovation survey after the previous regular survey for the years 2010-2012. The basis for comparison of all results in this report is thus the aforementioned off-year survey covering the period 2011-2013.

The overall finding of this comparison is that there were no major shifts in the level of innovation activity in Norwegian enterprises when comparing the periods 2011-2013 and 2012-2014. Fifty per cent of the enterprises covered by the Norwegian innovation survey introduced one or more forms of innovation during the three years from 2012 to 2014, a decrease of three percentage points.

Twenty-seven per cent of the enterprises introduced product innovations, while 24 per cent introduced process innovations. Organisational and marketing innovations were introduced by 25 and 29 per cent of the enterprises respectively. An additional 2 per cent reported having undertaken innovation activities to introduce product or process innovation, but that these activities had either been abandoned before completion or were still ongoing at the end of the observation period without having yielded an innovation in the enterprise.

In addition to measuring the four main types of innovation, the survey also covers other information related to the innovative practices and capabilities of enterprises. Two of the findings from these results are that enterprises who sell their goods in international markets and enterprises having a high share of employees with an university degree have a notably higher likelihood of being innovative that enterprises operation only locally/nationally and enterprises with a low share of graduate employees.