Austria: 22 major companies have signed a declaration to increase their R&D expenditure by 20%

Submitted by empirica on 24 November, 2011 - 20:12

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22 major Austrian companies have signed a declaration to increase their R&D expenditure by 20% until 2015. Initially, eleven technology companies had signed this declaration at the Alpbach Technology Forum in August; eleven further lead companies have now joined this initiative.

On 24 November, the following eleven companies signed the declaration to increase their R&D expenditure by 20% until 2015: Baxter, Bernecker+Rainer, Borealis, BRP-Powertrain, FACC, Fronius International, Knowles Electronics Austria, NXP Semiconductors Austria, Rosenbauer, Voestalpine und Wolford. The eleven initiating companies which had already declared their commitment at the Alpbach Technology Forum in August are: Infineon, Magna, Lenzing, KTM, Kiska, AT&S, AVL-List, Geoville, Doppelmayr, Marinomed and TTTech.

The list includes a representative sample of the largest companies in Austria. The 22 companies employ close to 79,000 people; 12,000 of them work in RTD. Jointly, these companies spend more than a billion euros on research, which represents more than a fifth of the total Austrian private sector research expenditure. If they keep their promise, their research expenditures will increase by at least 229 million euros until 2015.

The Federal Minister for Transport, Innovation and Technology, Doris Bures, welcomed the initiative, as it is expected to strengthen Austria’s ambition to become an “innovation leader”. The Austrian Government had presented, on 8 March 2011, its new strategy for research, technology and innovation (RTI). The declared goal is to move up from an “innovation follower” to the league of “innovation leaders” among the EU Member States. This objective links directly to the EU’s Innovation Scoreboard of 2010, which ranked Austria among the “innovation followers” (together with the UK, Belgium, Ireland, Luxembourg, France, Cyprus, Slovenia and Estonia). Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Germany are currently the “innovation leaders” in Europe, according to the Scoreboard. “The joint efforts of the government and the private sector will be important to achieve our goal of taking a leading position in research and development – in particular in economically difficult times”, said Ms Bures.

The minister argued for anticyclical investments in R&D. “The Government spent 1.5 billion euros on R&D between 2008 and 2011 to compensate for a draw-back in private sector investments in this period.” Ms Bures said that this was a major reason why Austria had experienced low unemployment and (comparatively) high growth even in the difficult period after the financial crisis of 2008 and that she hoped that further companies would joint the initiative. The government aims to increase private and public sector research investments from currently 2.76% to 3.76% of GDP until 2020.