MALTA

 

For Malta, one of the Moderate innovators, innovation performance is below the EU27 average but the rate of improvement is above that of the EU27. Relative strengths, compared to the country’s average performance, are in Finance and support and Economic effects and relative weaknesses are in Human resources, Linkages & entrepreneurship and Innovators.

Over the past 5 years, Throughputs has been the main driver of the improvement in innovation performance, in particular as a result from strong growth in EPO patents (16.2%), Community trademarks (16.5%), Community designs (23.5%) and Technology Balance of Payments flows (33.6%). Performance in Economic effects has hardly grown, in particular due to a stronger decrease in New-to-firm sales (-18.4%) than the increase in New-to-market sales (16.3%) [1].

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[1] The drop in sales new-to-firm products between the results for 2004 from CIS-4 and CIS-2006 is due to a change in the Maltese questionnaire such that the simple resale of new goods purchased from other enterprises is no longer considered as a product innovation.