Brussels, 23/08/2006 (Agence Europe) - Although the rates of growth in private investment in Research and Development (R&D) only increased by 0.7% in 2005, European companies are prepared to increase their level of investment by 5% over the next three years. This was revealed in a survey carried out in 400 companies from ten major industrial sectors which has just been published by the European Commission. “If we are to reach our objective of investing 3% of GDP in research and development, we need increased investment by the private sector,” said Janez Potoènik, European Commissioner for Science and Research. “For this reason the results of this survey are encouraging. We need to maintain and reinforce our efforts at European and national level to make Europe an attractive place for companies to carry out their research. The Commission will be coming forward with some more ideas in this area in autumn 2006.” An increase of 5% a year by private investors to R&D would be an unprecedented amount and would place European firms in a position that would rival that of their US competitors. The current rate of investment in R&D in the EU is only 1.9% of GDP, 56% of which comes from the private sector, explained the Commissioner's spokesperson on Wednesday.
The survey confirms the view that companies continue to prefer to locate R&D activities in their home-country. Therefore, the top locations for R&D activity in Europe continue to be Germany, the United Kingdom and France, Netherland, Italy and Sweden and of course the USA, China and India at an international level. The survey further highlights the main drivers of R&D location worldwide as access to markets and availability of trained researchers. Labour costs of researchers, though often cited as a factor, seem to have quite low influence on such decisions. Companies in the survey outsource an average of 18% of their R&D activity. Around two thirds of this goes to other companies and one third to public research organisations.
The sector which out-sources most of its R&D is pharmaceuticals and biotechnology (25%), and the least is IT hardware (5%). (The results of this study are available at: (http://www.iri.jrc.es/do/home/portal/articuloview?IDARTICULO=26&IDIDIOMA=1&IDSECCION=2 ).