Innovation creates growth

New report from the Centre for Economic and Business Research

Companies renewing and innovating their products, production processes, organisation, marketing or designs, have a higher productivity and create more value than companies that are not innovative.

These are the words of a new study made by the Centre for Economic and Business Research at CBS for the Ministry of Economic and Business Affairs.

Innovation must move to a higher gear

- The new analysis proves that innovative companies have significantly higher productivity than other companies. If we are to increase growth and productivity, innovation must move to a higher gear. This is also why we have invested a substantial amount of money in education, research and innovation in the past few years. However, it will be a few years before we can see the total impact on productivity, says the Minister for Economic and Business Affairs.

Only 40 percent of Danish companies have introduced new products or processes in the period of 2006-2008. That is not as much as in a number of comparable countries, e.g. Finland and Sweden. If you take a look at organisation and marketing, Danish companies are more innovative than for instance Finnish and Swedish companies. But Denmark is still outside top 5.

The more highly skilled, the larger innovation potential

The analysis also shows that the companies with the largest innovation potential have many highly skilled employees. The employee's degree is actually quite important. Both high-skilled employees with a technical and a social science background support the innovation in a broad sense, while the human science graduates especially increase the probability of new designs and marketing.

Professor Anders Sørensen and Senior Analyst Martin Junge have developed the analysis.