The main findings are as follows:

• Companies expect to maintain robust R&D investment increases (average 4% p.a.) over the next three years. These expectations indicate a positive and stable trend for R&D investment growth as observed before the 2008 economic and financial crises.
• The responding companies report significant shares of sales coming from innovative products and services introduced in the past three years: from 33% to 10% in high and low R&D intensity sectors respectively.The average share of sales coming from new innovative products and services was 18%.
• Almost half of the respondents named themselves as the innovation leader in the sector.
  R&D within the company is the most important component of innovation, followed by market research related activities for new product introduction.
• Collaboration agreements were a more important way of knowledge sharing than licencing.
  For the impact of factors and policies on the company’s innovation activities, national public support had the most positive effect.
• Labour costs and conditions of Intellectual Property Rights (enforcement, time and costs) continue to be perceived as negative factors for company innovations. This underlines the importance of an efficient IPR regime for the support of company innovations.
• The majority of R&D collaboration agreements with other companies are with customers or suppliers (vertical agreements), while less than 10% are made with competitors.
• More than one fifth of the respondents preferred Germany as the most attractive location for outsourcing R&D, mostly because of a very high share of statements from the home country, followed closely by the US.
• The US is the most attractive source of Intellectual Property Rights, followed by Germany.
  Among the types of Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs) licencing, licencing-in ranges before licencing-out.
• Favourable tax treatment of licencing revenue would encourage more licencing activity.
  High R&D intensive companies report the highest licencing-in expenditure and licencing-out revenues.