R&D News & Views – May 2007

Welcome to” R&D News & Views" in which we will keep you updated with news about business, science and technology.

Contents

• The Budget & R&D
• ACE – Annual Carbon Emissions Calculator
• The “missing billion” and private sector expenditure on R&D
• Technical information service

The Budget & R&D

As many people will be aware the Budget contained significant news on R&D. The available details of this can be found here. While we believe the news is generally good, “the devil will be in the detail” and we will have a more comprehensive look at the implications in a subsequent newsletter.

ACE

In March we made ACE, the annual carbon emission calculator available and we have received very positive feedback on this. However, there was a small issue with a formula which we have remedied, any spreadsheets downloaded after April 5th will not be affected.

If you did download prior to this date and the error is an issue for you please contact us and we will correct the spreadsheet so that you need not re-enter your data. Alternatively you can simply download the updated version here.

On a more positive note from Mark Roberts, GreenFleet Programme Manager Sustainable Business Network:

“I downloaded ACE after reading about it in your newsletter. I have seen a few sustainability tools done in excel and this definitely one of the better ones, especially in terms of usability for SME’s. I will be trialing it with a view to recommending to our board that the SBN uses it for its own carbon recording and reporting……. “

We are also pleased to be able to announce that the SBN has adopted ACE to use for its own CO2 calculations and reporting. Mark Roberts is particularly interested in hearing from anyone who is using ACE and would be prepared to have their experience in monitoring and managing their carbon emissions used in a case study. Mark can be contacted at mark@sustainable.org.nz

The “missing billion”

Over recent years there has been ongoing comment on the supposed low level of investment by the private sector in R&D and this has been categorized as the “missing billion” that the private sector does not spend on R&D. This is based on a back of the envelope comparison with the OECD average. This suggests that the private sector should spend about 1.5% of GDP whereas the current spend is of the order of 0.5% of GDP.

There are a number of definitional issues and omissions in this analysis:

• Generally small and medium sized businesses, which represent 93% on NZ business, are excluded; and
• the definition of R&D used focuses on investigation to increase knowledge as a primary objective.

As a result we believe it significantly underestimates the level of R&D investment by the private sector. We raise the issue as the debate seems worthy of more rigour than it is currently receiving.

An example of what we see as a more useful type of analysis is in the report “Innovation in New Zealand, 2005”

Table 1. Comparison of expenditure on innovation and R&D (sourced from Statistics NZ, Innovation in New Zealand, 2005)

Key points of the 2005 innovation survey are:

• In 2005, 52% of businesses reported innovation activity compared with 8% performing R&D.
• Not only do significantly more firms innovate, both as a percentage and in absolute terms, they also spend more as a percentage of total expenditure.
• Interestingly, as a proportion of total expenditure, the expenditure on innovative activity does not vary greatly with business size. The level is reasonably consistent in each expenditure category. This would appear to highlight the importance of other innovation activities such as the acquisition of new machinery and equipment, design and marketing activities in addition to R&D.
• There is a significant percentage of businesses of all sizes spending at <2% of total expenditure on R&D, The percentage spending >5% is also consistent across all business sizes.
• Not surprisingly the most common reason for innovating was to increase revenue (92%), not investigation.

Additionally the survey suggests that the level of innovative activity carried out by New Zealand enterprises is at a level at least comparable with other countries. For example New Zealand ranked ahead of Norway, France, Australia and Portugal in terms of total innovation rate.

So well done the innovators!

We have a more detailed document on this and would be pleased to provide this.

Technical Information Service

Who can keep up with the huge volume of new information being published every year in the many thousands of scientific/technical journals?

This knowledge forms a significant resource for businesses for activities such as:

• Problem solving
• Project planning
• Technical marketing.

We can save you time by reviewing and summarising specialist technical information from patent and PVR data bases and scientific journals in your area of business.

CATALYST™ staff and our wide network of associates have a science training and extensive experience in a range of biological sciences. We can efficiently analyse and filter irrelevant publications providing you with a technically sound, concise report of the latest outputs. This can be done as a one-off review basis on specific topics or alternatively we can provide a regular update to meet your requirements.

Please contact us to discuss your requirements.