Investing in innovation

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NESTA's Innovation Index provides a more accurate measure of the investment in innovation in the UK.  However, there were gaps in the available data. This report presents the innovative new survey we commissioned alongside the Office for National Statistics and Imperial College to address the gaps in key areas of innovation data.

The Investment in Intangible Asset survey explicitly measures the level of expenditures, external and internal, that UK businesses commit to intangible assets. While previous studies have attempted to gather firm-level data on the range of intangibles beyond R&D, the Investment in Intangible Asset survey is one of the first to extend this to survey firms' accounting methods for measuring depreciation of intangible assets.

The results of the survey provide a more accurate measure of the scale of investments and the results of the survey will be integrated into the forthcoming Innovation Index. This will make the investment data and the measure of the contributions to productivity more accurate.

Published
July 2010

Author
Gaganan Awano (ONS), Mark Franklin (ONS), Jonathan Haskel (Imperial College) and Zafeira Kastrinaki (Imperial College)