ZAGREB, 29 July (Hina) – Slightly more than one third of Croatian businesses are innovative, shows a survey by the national statistical office on innovation activities in the period from 2020 to 2022, conducted on a sample of 4,198 businesses.

The survey defines innovative business as businesses that introduced a product innovation (a physical product or service) or a process innovation in the surveyed period. It shows that the share of innovative businesses grows with their size. In the surveyed period, there were 33.7% of innovative small businesses, 45.6% of innovative medium businesses and 68.4% of innovative big businesses.

Manufacturing businesses account for 39.1% of innovative businesses while 35% of innovative businesses are businesses providing services.

Innovative companies accounted for 65.9% of the total sales of the surveyed companies in 2022, and 57.1% of all employees in 2022 worked for innovative companies.

With regard to company size, 85% of innovative businesses were large businesses, 62.3% were medium businesses and 40.4% were small businesses.

Innovation expenditure was reported by 24.5% of the surveyed businesses, and the expenditure related mostly to innovation activities (9.5% of the surveyed businesses), own research and development activities (9.3%) and external R&D services (5.7%).

The surveyed businesses most often conduct product innovation and process innovation on their own (9.7% and 25.6% respectively),В while 6.5% conduct product innovation and 10.3% process innovation in cooperation with other companies. Most of the surveyed companies, 31.9%, do it both on their own and in cooperation with others.

Of the innovative businesses, 42.5% received some form of financial support, and 31% used it for R&D or other innovation activities.