Companies increase spending on innovation, says ABDI survey

The proportion of Brazilian industries that performed some type of innovation in processes or products in the 1st quarter of 2018 was 45.9% and achieved the best result in a year. This is what the Innovation Survey of the Brazilian Agency for Industrial Development (ABDI) points out, commissioned from Fundação Getúlio Vargas (FGV) and released on July 25th.
 
“Brazil climbed five positions in the world innovation ranking of the World Intellectual Property Organization, released recently, and moved to 64th place among 126 countries. We have improved and the ABDI Survey shows that there is an increase in spending on innovation, but we have a long way to go and this will only happen with continued investment, improvement in the economic scenario and reforms, such as the tax reform”, says Guto Ferreira, president of ABDI.    
 
The Survey reveals that spending on innovation has resumed after six months of decline. The indicator rose again and went from 92.8 points to 96.6 points between the 4th quarter of 2017 and the 1st period of this year. The data is obtained by the difference between the proportion of companies that claimed to have increased spending on innovation and those that maintained or decreased it, plus 100. When the indicator, which varies on a scale from 0 to 200, remains below 100 points , means that a greater number of companies decreased or did not invest in innovation in the researched period.
 
The share of companies surveyed that increased spending on innovation went from 11% to 21.6%, the highest level since Q3 2014 (23.4%), while the industries that decreased resources for innovation went from 13.6% to 11, 3%, in the same period. However, the percentage of companies that did not spend went from 4.6% in the 4th quarter of 2017 to 13.7% in the 1st quarter of 2018.
 
investment outlook
 
Among the companies surveyed, 54.1% intend to innovate in the second quarter of 2018, an increase of 3.5 percentage points from the previous period. This is the best result since the 2nd quarter of 2015, which had an innovation perspective of 56% in the industries.
 
However, this optimism may be affected by the truck drivers' strike, which started after the Innovation Survey was carried out. The stoppage caused a decline of 3.34% in economic activity in May, compared to April, according to data from the Central Bank.
 
“I believe that, even with less money available, this strike shows that companies should increase investments in innovation as opposed to decreasing. It was a situation that revealed the country's dependence on a single mode of transport, a scenario that will only be overcome with new solutions in logistics, which requires research and investments”, analyzes Guto Ferreira, president of ABDI.
 
Productivity
 
To raise the level of productivity in the coming years, 64.2% of companies consider that investing in equipment and facilities and 63% in improving management methods are efforts that should be considered. The qualification of the workforce was another item mentioned by more than half of the companies (51.5%). Only 2.4% of them say they do not have any planned actions to gain productivity on the horizon.
 
Investments in innovation ranked fourth in the priority of companies to increase productivity, with 41.4% of nominations. From the universe of these 79 companies that believe that investments in innovation can increase productivity in the coming years, 30.7% belong to segments with a productive system linked to Transformation of the productive structure – which, on average, has a tendency to innovate more products than the others – 25.7% Scale intensive, 25% Work intensive and 18.6% related to Agribusiness.
 
R&D occupation
 
The increase in the proportion of companies that innovate has as one of its probable causes the improvement in the qualification of research and development (R&D) professionals. There was a proportional growth of industries with masters, from 50.6% to 58.2%, and doctors, from 27.6% to 30.4%, in the 1st quarter of 2018 compared to the 3rd quarter of 2017. Companies that claim to have more than seven professionals with postgraduate degrees dedicated to innovation reached 29.3%, the highest level of the series started in 2010.
 
The collection period for the Innovation Survey is quarterly and occurs in the first two months following the survey's reference quarter. For the 1st quarter 2018 edition, 338 questionnaires were applied between April 13 and June 25.