Percentage of Companies with Product and Process Innovations in Industry and Business-Related Services in Germany

The innovator rate measures the percentage of companies with at least one product or process innovation in the past three years. It is an indicator of companies' participation in innovation or their willingness to engage in innovation activities.

In 2021, the innovator rate was higher in R&D-intensive industry (71.5 percent) than in knowledge-intensive services (65.1 percent), other industries (53.7 percent) and other services (43.8 percent). R&D-intensive industry thus remained the most innovative of the sectors considered here. However, the R&D-intensive industries recorded a significant decline in the innovator rate by almost 9 percentage points since 2018.

A differentiation by product and process innovations shows that in particular the share of companies with at least one product innovation in the R&D-intensive industries in 2021, at 46.8 percent, was significantly below the level of 2018 (61.8 percent).

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