Austrian Research and Technology Report 2020

1. Current Trends
33
vey methodology (see Frascati Manual 2015). This 
means, for instance, that government R&D funding 
fell by 5 percentage points between 2015 and 2017, 
with funding from firms rising accordingly.
Overall, it can be established that Austrian com-
panies are making an essential contribution to re-
search and development funding, accounting for over 
half of total funds, and are thus playing a key role in 
ensuring the country’s capability to innovate and 
thus its competitiveness on the international stage. 
Making up 29%, funding from direct government 
(28%) and higher education (1%) funds is also largely 
in line with the RTI strategy’s target figure of one 
third of R&D funding from the public sector. In addi-
tion, the public sector accounts for a similarly high 
percentage of R&D funding in other countries that 
are strong on innovation such as Germany, Finland 
and Denmark.
25 See OECD (2019b).
Number of patent applications
The OECD defines a triadic patent as a set of pat-
ents for the same invention registered simultaneous-
ly with the European Patent Office (EPO), the Japa-
nese Patent Organization (JPO) and the United 
States Patent and Trademark Organization (USPTO). 
The concept of the triadic patent lends itself partic-
ularly well to international comparisons and allows 
conclusions to be drawn about a country’s R&D out-
put (i.e. its capability to innovate). It reflects the 
technological and economic value of inventions as 
patent applications in several countries can serve as 
an indicator of the quality of inventions.
Fig. 1-13 depicts triadic patent intensity according 
to the country of origin for the years 2013 and 2017.
25
It appears as the number of patents per 1,000 R&D 
employees. Many countries recorded a decline in 
patent intensity between 2013 and 2017, including