Abhatoo - Centre Nationale de Documentation

During the last years, the EU Industrial R&D Investment Scoreboard (European Commission, 2009) has been acknowledged as one of the most important tools for the individuation of world top R&D performers, both EU and non-EU based. Besides the ranking of such companies, the EU R&D Scoreboard allows direct comparison of the main aggregate values, such as R&D investment and employees, sales and capital expenditure. In addition, a sector as well as a geographical disaggregation is provided. As for the second one, it refers to the country of residence of each Scoreboard company: that implies that the entire world R&D investment of the company is attributed to the single country of ownership.

Such peculiarity presents a major limitation: it is not possible to individuate the territory of actual execution of the R&D investment. Since the internationalisation of R&D activities is one of the most important issues, at present (UNCTAD, 2005; OECD, 2008), we feel the need of overcoming the limitation in the Scoreboard approach by proposing a methodological framework of collaboration with European business R&D (BERD) statistics producers. Such collaboration resides in the exchange of aggregated data (therefore respecting the confidentiality issues) regarding the top EU R&D performers.

In the paper, we report the main methodological suggestions to achieve such result, as well as the findings from a pilot exercise with the Italian Statistical Office, actually extended in a ongoing project with other three EU countries (Belgium, Finland and Germany). The convergence of Scoreboard and BERD data is considered as a very important achievement in order to set up further developments at the EU27 level.