Austrian Research and Technology Report 2020

Relationship capital 
Finally, the fourth pillar of the capability to innovate 
is relationship capital. Interaction amongst individu-
als and companies and collaboration between com-
panies and research institutions can play a key role in 
generating knowledge and transferring knowledge 
and technology and can thus contribute significantly 
to the development of new products and processes. 
Because of the complexity of (particularly technical) 
innovations as well as for financial reasons, the inter-
action between various players is decisive when it 
Fig. 1-26: Employment in knowledge-intensive activities (comparison with Europe in
the 2011 reference year), 2019
0
50
100
150
200
250
LU
X
IRL
M
LT
SW
E
GBR
NL
D
CY
P
FI
N
BEL
DN
K
AUT
DE
U
FRA
Ø 
EU
-2
8
IT
A
SV
N
ES
T
CZ
E
ES
P
GRC
LV
A
HRV
HU
N
PRT
SV
K
POL
BG
R
LT
U
RO
U
CH
E
EU Member States
Reference countries
In r
el
at
io
n t
o E
ur
op
e 2
01
1 i
n %
* Country data not available for the reference years: LUX, MLT.
Source: European Commission (2019b). Graphic: iit.

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54
Austrian Research and Technology Report 2020
comes to driving forward innovations on a technolog-
ical level and developing and launching new or im-
proved products and technologies.
To reflect relationship capital and analyse and 
compare it on an international scale, this report uses 
two questions from the global harmonised Executive 
Opinion Survey conducted by the World Economic 
Forum:
58
 (1) “In your country, to what extent do com-
panies collaborate in sharing ideas and innovating?”
) 
and (2) “
In your country, to what extent do business 
and universities collaborate on research and devel-
opment (R&D)?”
Both the scale of collaboration between different 
companies and the scale of collaboration between 
companies and higher education institutions are im-
portant elements of relationship capital. The possi-
ble answers are assigned a score on a scale from one 
58 See World Economic Forum (2020a).
(“
not at all
“) to seven (“
to a great extent
”), with high-
er values denoting closer collaboration.
Fig. 1-27 illustrates the results for the question on 
collaboration between companies. It shows that 
Austria is ninth in the EU with a score of 4.2, while 
Germany is the EU’s top performer with 5.3. In terms 
of the non-European reference countries included for 
comparison purposes, both the USA and Switzerland 
also score highly with 5.7 and 4.9 respectively. A 
score of 4 on the Likert scale from one to seven is to 
be regarded as a neutral value that indicates neither 
a little nor a lot of collaboration. In this respect, 
Austria’s score of 4.2 is only marginally positive, al-
beit somewhat higher than the European average. 
Results for the question “
In your country, to what 
extent do business and universities collaborate on 
research and development (R&D)?”
are presented in