CSO: Foreign owned firms account for 64% of innovation

DUBLIN, Ireland - Recent data released by the Central Statistics Office (CSO) has shown that domestic firms in Ireland spent 36 percent of the 4.6 billion euros invested into innovation in the country in 2016.

Data showed that multinationals were responsible for the balance.

CSO figures showed that foreign-owned enterprises, which make up fewer than one in five of all relevant businesses, accounted for 64 percent of innovation-related expenditure in 2016 in Ireland, including 1.4 billion euros of expenditure on in-house R&D.

Further, out of the 1.7 billion euros spent by Irish businesses, just under half the spending, or 793 million euros, went to in-house research and development (R&D).

Further, the tax system is structured to promote investment in R&D, seen as the driver of economic well-being by policymakers.

CSO noted that this distribution of innovation expenditure between Irish and foreign-owned enterprises, all of which employ a minimum of 10 employees, has stayed broadly consistent over the six-year period between 2010 and 2016.

CSO showed that the total spend on innovation in Ireland in 2016 represented a 22 percent increase on the 2014 figure of 3.8 billion euros.

The CSO stated that just under two in five enterprises reported innovation expenditure in 2016.

It added two in three larger enterprises reported innovation expenditure between 2014 and 2016, while only 36 percent of small and medium enterprises said that they had spent on innovation during the period.