Just over a third of Croatian companies are innovative. This is shown by a survey conducted by the Croatian Bureau of Statistics on innovation activities in the period from 2020 to 2022, which was carried out on a sample of 4,198 companies.

The survey defines innovative companies as companies that have introduced a product innovation (a physical product or service) or a process innovation in the period analysed. It shows that the proportion of innovative companies increases with their size. In the period analysed, there were 33.7% innovative small companies, 45.6% innovative medium-sized companies and 68.4% innovative large companies.

The manufacturing industry accounts for 39.1% of innovative companies, while 35% of innovative companies are active in the service sector.

Innovative companies accounted for 65.9% of the total turnover of the companies analysed in 2022 and 57.1% of all employees in 2022 worked in innovative companies.

Companies most frequently carry out product and process innovations themselves

In terms of company size, 85% of innovative companies were large companies, 62.3% were medium-sized companies and 40.4% were small companies.

Innovation expenditure was reported by 24.5% of the companies surveyed, and the expenditure mainly related to innovation activities (9.5% of the companies surveyed), in-house research and development activities (9.3%) and external R&D services (5.7%).

The companies surveyed most frequently carry out product and process innovations themselves (9.7% and 25.6% respectively), while 6.5% carry out product innovations and 10.3% process innovations in collaboration with other companies. Most of the companies surveyed, 31.9%, do this both alone and in collaboration with others.

Of the innovative companies, 42.5% received some form of financial support, and 31% used this for R&D or other innovation activities.