Thematics

Innobarometer - Impact of innovation demand

Sophisticated consumer demand should be an important driver for innovation products and services. One thesis is that firms primarily benefit from sophisticated consumer demand in their domestic market, while an alternative view is that export-oriented firms can build on sophisticated consumer demand in their foreign markets.

The 2005 Innobarometer provides a measure of innovation demand, based on a survey of 30,000 Europeans in the 25 Member States plus Bulgaria , Romania and Turkey . A set of questions was asked to identify how European citizens feel attracted by innovative products or services. Their replies characterise the demand for innovation from customers, an element that is generally only approximated through inappropriate indicators.

Innovative products or services were described as new or improved ones. For the first time, a typology based on attractiveness to innovative products or services is proposed for all Member States leading to 4 categories for EU-25 citizens (see Figure 14):

• 11% are enthusiasts towards innovation Pro-innovation --------------> pro-innovation
• 39% are attracted by innovation ------------------------------------------> pro-innovation
• 33% are reluctant to innovation
• 16% are anti-innovation

The results indicate that Europe is evenly split between those attracted by innovation – those that are pro-innovation – and those more or less reluctant. Malta , Slovakia , Romania and Italy are countries with the highest proportion of pro-innovation citizens. However there is no clear gap with the following countries. On the other side, the typology analysis shows that citizens in Poland , Latvia , Germany and Finland are least ready to embrace innovation.

The concept of pro-innovation is of interest as it could be an explaining factor for the differences in the transformation of innovation inputs into innovation outputs as described in section 2.4. The EIS 2005 indeed provides first clues of this relationship.

The case of countries with the highest proportion of pro-innovation citizens ( Malta , Slovakia , Romania , Italy and France) is characteristic as these countries all have better results for the output indicators of the EIS than for the input indicators if compared with European trend. More generally; among the 10 countries having the highest share of pro-innovation population, 9 have an output/input rate above the EU trend (Figure 7). Conversely, 7 countries among the 10 where the population readiness for innovation is the lowest have a below average output/input ratio. Significant exceptions in this last category are Germany and Austria , where results may indicate that the drivers for innovation do not lie in the public demand but rather come from the side of the firm.