Commissioner: EU facing an innovation emergency

IRELAND is one of just two EU countries where the spend by industry on research and development (R&D) fell last year.

While it grew in the EU overall, Innovation Commissioner Máire Geoghegan-Quinn warned of an innovation emergency. She is hosting Europe’s first Innovation Convention in December, at which some of the world’s top business people, including Ryanair’s Michael O’Leary, will give a master class on innovation.

Ireland remains in the top 10 EU countries for spend on R&D by its businesses but makes up just 1.5% of the EU’s spend, putting the country at the bottom of the table.

This coincides with a drop in the state spend which fell to about €870 million last year or 0.67% of GDP, bringing the total to 1.66% of GDP compared to 3.6% by Finland — EU leader.

The biggest business investor is Seagate Technology, a computer hardware firm that spent €655m last year followed by Accenture support services at €286m.

Ireland contrasted with the general growth of investment across the EU, which rose 6% overall, but US based companies did better at 10%.

The statistics are in the EU’s industrial R&D investment scorecard, announced by Ms Geoghegan-Quinn, covering both the top 1,000 EU and non EU companies investments in research.

She said last year’s results showed the effect of the recession and financial crisis but that this year there were considerable signs of recovery, with a significant increase in R&D and a double-digit increase in sales, operating profits and market valuation of companies.

She said: “EU companies are doing well, but should be doing better. There is only one company, Germany’s Volkswagen, in the overall top ten. We risk losing our foothold in the top ten and are slipping down the scale. We are facing an emergency in innovation. We need quick adoption on patents, standards, public procurement and risk capital.”

The convention which will be held in Brussels, will bring together business leaders, high-level policy-makers and top researchers.