More than two fifths of enterprises in Portugal invested in innovation between 2022 and 2024, new data from INE, Portugal’s statistics body, has found.
The percentage of firms investing in innovation is down on previous two-year periods, the data showed – some 44.7% of enterprises reported innovation activities between 2020 and 2022, 48.0% between 2018 and 2020, and 32.4% between 2016 and 2018.
Product innovation in goods and services accounted for the highest share of innovation (24.3%) in the period, while 37.6% introduced process innovations. This compares to 22.6% and 40.4%, respectively, in the previous period.
The likelihood of innovation activity varied depending on enterprise size, INE noted. Among enterprises with 250 or more employees, 78.7% reported innovation activity, while among enterprises with between 10 and 249 employees, 41.7% reported innovation activity.
Sector by sector
Differences were also observed across economic sectors. The information and communication sector recorded more than two thirds (68.9%) of enterprises with innovation activity.
Elsewhere, financial services recorded 59.7%. Distributive trade recorded 45.4%, while manufacturing and energy recorded 45.1%.
Environmental benefits
In the same period, 59.6% of innovative enterprises introduced innovations that had environmental benefits. These benefits were either obtained within the enterprise itself or during the use of goods or services by end users.
Within this group, 57.3% reported environmental benefits within the enterprise, and 48.7% reported benefits during use by end users.
In 2024, total expenditure on innovation activities in Portugal reached €4,865 million. This represented an increase of 25.3% compared with 2022. Innovation expenditure represented around 1.0% of total enterprise turnover, the same proportion recorded in 2022. Read more here.
