Austrian Research and Technology Report 2020

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Austrian Research and Technology Report 2020
has some catching up to do, especially with regard 
to venture capital expenditure, the percentage of the 
population employed in fast-growing companies, and 
exports of knowledge-intensive services. 
In the “Innovation Indicator”, an international com-
parison published by the Federation of German In-
dustries (BDI) together with the Fraunhofer ISI and 
the Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research 
(ZEW), Austria is currently in ninth place (out of a 
total of 35 countries). This puts it ahead of strong 
innovators such as South Korea and Finland. Al-
though Austria’s indicator score of 50 points (out of 
a possible 100) in the “Innovation Indicator 2020” is 
unchanged on its performance in the “Innovation In-
dicator 2018”, it has gone up two places in the coun-
try rankings.
In the overall analysis, Austria’s technological and 
scientific performance and innovation capability put 
it in a strong midfield position globally. Although the 
country has not yet managed to break into the group 
of Innovation Leaders overall, it has enjoyed a top 
position among the Strong Innovators for some time 
now. Here too, however, Austria is already amongst 
the leaders when it comes to individual indicators 
such as R&D intensity. This suggests that efforts to 
pursue the RTI strategy on an on-going basis should 
continue in order to achieve a balance between input 
and output factors and focus even more strongly on 
input than has been the case to date. 
1.2.2 Development of Austria’s position in 
terms of digitalisation
As in the Austrian Research and Technology Report 
2019, the European Commission’s Digital Economy 
and Society Index (DESI)
34
and Global Innovation In-
dex
35
are used as the basis for comparison in order to 
gauge Austria’s standing in the digitalisation rank-
ings. These two data sources are well suited to a 
comparative analysis of developments in digitalisa-
34 See European Commission (2019f), (2019d).
35 See Cornell University et al. (2019).
tion as they contain very detailed information on the 
availability and use of information and communica-
tion technologies and their employment in industry, 
business and administration. This information also 
allows countries to be compared on specific aspects 
of digitalisation. 
The following section assesses Austria’s position 
within the EU based on the DESI index with its five 
dimensions of Connectivity, Human Capital, Internet 
Use, Integration of Digital Technology and Digital 
Public Services. An indicator is calculated, analysed 
and compared for each dimension. These overarching 
indicators are composed of several sub-indicators; 
the box below shows the make-up of each indicator. 
Countries can also be compared at sub-indicator lev-
el.