On 18 November 2022, Eurostat published the final data from the Community Innovation Survey 2020.

According to the final results, more than half of all the enterprises in the EU reported some form of innovation activity (53 %) during the reference period 2018–2020. Within the EU, the highest share of innovative enterprises were observed in Greece (73 % of all enterprises), Belgium (71 %), Germany and Finland (both 69 %). On the other hand, the lowest levels of innovative activity were recorded in Romania (11 %), Latvia (32%), Hungary and Spain (both 33%).

In terms of type of innovation introduced, in the EU, almost half of all enterprises (48.4 %) have introduced product and/or business process innovations during the 2018-2020 period, with the share of business process innovations significantly higher than the share of product innovations. By firm size, on average, medium and large enterprises were more likely to have introduced innovations (60.1% and 74.1%, respectively) than the smaller enterprises (44.5%). In fact, almost seven out of ten large enterprises introduced a business process innovation (68.8 %) and more than half a product innovation (54.7 %); while, for small enterprises, almost four of ten are process innovators and around one-quarter are product innovators.

As for the novelty of the product innovation, during the same period, more than one-fifth of all enterprises in Belgium, Finland, Slovenia, Greece and Austria were product innovators with goods or services that were new to the market. Regarding product innovations that were new to the enterprise, 14 Member States reported shares of more than one-fifth, with the highest share recorded in Cyprus (39.5 %) and the lowest registered in Romania (6.8 %).

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