Innovation Europe > News > Innovation EU Vol2-1 > Innovation Slovenia

In 2008, Slovenian exports represented 68.5% of GDP with about half of this concentrated in four markets only (Germany, Italy, Croatia and Austria). Any slow down in economic activity in these countries is transferred to the Slovenian economy.

Partly as a consequence of the recession, in 2007 the overall investment in R&D declined as a share of GDP to 1.45%. The government acknowledges the inability to meet the (Lisbon) 3% R&D investment target by 2010 and has postponed it to 2013.

Slovenia is now in the group of moderate innovators, according to the European Innovation Scoreboard (EIS) 2008. Initially the government responded to the crisis with an extensive crisis package, including investment in research and development (R&D), but since then the budgets for innovation support have been revised sharply downwards.

Main innovation challenges

• Maintain the level of R&D investment, both in the public and business sector.
• Better co-ordination and transparency of the innovation support network.
• Low innovation activity among small enterprises.

Conclusion

National statistics on innovation show that only 7.3% of innovation-active enterprises have received information from different support institutions. An OECD Report (2009) identified lack of systemic support to enterprises as one of the key deficiencies of the National Innovation System (NIS).

The number of innovation-active small enterprises has increased slightly in the period from 2004 to 2006 (CIS, 2006) to 27.7%, but the figure remains relatively low. In spite of the fact that several measures and institutions have been designed specifically to improve the innovation activity of small firms, this target group actually uses the innovation infrastructure least.

The Slovenian RD&I framework needs stability in terms of measures and instruments to give companies a chance to get used to the offered support.

The lack of interest in some industrial sectors for RD&I, and especially SMEs in these sectors, is the result of several, sometimes conflicting reasons: from lack of competition (certain services), to lack of financial and human resources in long-neglected sectors that were traditionally not considered as R&D important, for example textiles and food processing.