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

Spain ranks 16th within the EU-27 for innovation. This position is in part due to strong growth in private credit (12.7%), broadband access by firms (15.3%) and non-R&D innovation expenditures (13.4%).

Spain has implemented a set of measures in the National Reform Programme (NRP) and the new National Plan for Scientific Research, Development and Technological Innovation (VI National Plan for the period 2008–11). €490m has been allocated for R&D programmes.

This represents 4.45% of the “anticyclical” government expenditure of €11bn. This is expected to create 22,000 jobs. The Interempresas programme focuses on boosting experimental RDI projects carried out by associations of enterprises, mainly in the health and energy sector.

The InnoCash programme encourages publicprivate initiatives that exploit research originating in public research and technology centres. The Avanza2 plan encourages the application of ICT with special emphasis on sustainability and energy saving.

Main innovation challenges

• Increased public-private co-operation.
• Increase R&D entrepreneurial expenditures.
• Overcome the lack of qualified RDI human capital.

Conclusion

Spanish universities do not have a developed culture of innovation. This can be seen in patents: Spain 29.3, EU average 105.7; and publicprivate co-publications: Spain 10.6 versus an EU average of 31.4.

To counter this, the Spanish government has put in place the CENIT programme to foster public-private collaboration. In the fourth round of this programme, a total of 14 projects were approved with a combined budget of €376m, of which half comes from the private sector. This is spread between 210 companies and 311 research groups.

Innocash has recently been established to advise and favour private investment in innovation projects, originated in public research organisations (PROs). In Spain R&D entrepreneurial expenditure represents 56% (€7,474.9m) of the national R&D expenditures and 0.71% of GDP. These values are below the EU average for business R&D expenditure (BERD) but this difference has been decreasing during the last decade.

From 2000 to 2007, the number of researchers in Spain increased by 60% according to the Spanish National Institute of Statistics (INE), to 122,624. This growth has been particularly marked in the private sector. Spain is still below the EU average with S&E and SSH graduates values of 0.67 against an EU average of 1.11 per thousand. Two measures have been launched to overcome the lack of RDI personnel:

• The “I3 programme”, which is focused on Spanish or foreign lecturers-researchers with a prestigious research track record
• The “Torres Quevedo programme”, which has its focus set on the mobility of researchers between the public and private sectors.