Two EU countries among world’s corporate R&D ‘big four’

Sixty-five per cent of the world’s top R&D-intensive firms have their headquarters in just four countries, two of which are in the EU—but Europe’s dominance disappears in ICT, a report has found.

The UK and Germany were among the global ‘big four’ hosts of R&D-intensive companies in 2014, according to a report published by the OECD and the Joint Research Centre, the European Commission’s science service, on 29 September.

The United States and Japan were also among the top four hosts of R&D investors’ headquarters in 2014. Fifteen per cent of such companies were based in China and Taiwan, according to the report, which was launched in Spain at CONCORDi 2017, the biennial European Conference on Corporate R&D and Innovation.