Innovative companies in the Valencian Community have improved their commitment to R&D in the 2020-2022 period, but according to INE data, they are still far from the investment made by Madrid companies above all, but also by Catalan and Basque companies.
The latest “Business Innovation Survey” published, with data from more than 40,000 companies with 10 or more employees, shows how the investment made by Valencian companies is 563,000 euros on average, while those in the Community of Madrid allocate up to 1,565,000 euros, being the Spanish leader. Behind are the companies from Catalonia, with 912,000 euros on average, and those from the Basque Country, with 894,000 euros. Behind, and in this order, Castilla y León and Galicia, while the Valencian territory occupies seventh place.
The INE data analyzed by the COTEC Foundation affects the “persistence of territorial differences”, since while the Basque Country leads the regional ranking with 30% of innovative companies, Asturias or the Balearic Islands are at 18%. In the Valencian Community, innovative companies represent 25.7%, and are thus almost two points above the state average, which is 23.9%. Curiously, in Madrid there is a lower percentage of innovative companies (24.6%), but overall they allocate more.
It is one of the positive readings made by the Generalitat Valenciana, which also highlights how the intensity in innovation, that is, the spending dedicated to this type of activities with respect to the total turnover, is 1.05% in the Community. Valenciana, above the state average which stands at 0.95%.
Fact by fact, the Valencian Community is also in a good position in terms of process and product innovation, since it is one of the six autonomous communities that exceed the Spanish average in both process and product innovation, along with País Basque, Catalonia, Madrid, Aragon and Navarra. In the national context, the COTEC Foundation points out that 23.9% of Spanish companies with 10 or more workers were innovative (in their product or in their business processes), compared to 22.6% in the 2018-2020 period ( 1 .3 percentage points). By type of innovation, 12% were product innovators, and 21% were process innovators.
Overall, spending on business innovation in the Valencian Community during 2022 reached 1,815,254 million euros, the highest figure in the entire historical series and 42.7% above that recorded in 2020. It represents 8.7% of the State’s total.
And although Madrid (30.2%), Catalonia (26.2%) and the Basque Country (9.1%) spent more than the Valencian Community in absolute values, the Department of Industry highlights that “our recovery rate in innovation , after the general decline in 2020, far exceeds all of those regions. The regional secretary of Innovation, Jerónimo Mora, points out that these data demonstrate “the strength, intensity and dynamism with which business innovation has recovered in our territory. In fact, in the strictly peninsular area, only Castilla-La Mancha is ahead of us by just a few tenths.”
