company. The advantage of this approach is that all stages of the innovation process
will be present from the initial idea to the production of final products and that the
surveys would therefore identify issues raised by plant managers in undertaking each
stage of the innovation process. From the UK perspective, at least, this issue of the
capability of plants to exploit research results is of particular importance. The risk
inherent in a plant-based approach is that it might miss intra-company technology
transfers, particularly between centralised R&D or development facilities and
manufacturing sites. In the survey questionnaires, however, allowance is made for
relationships between innovating sites and other group plants or resources.
Other commonalities relate to the survey instruments themselves. In each case the
original questionnaire was compiled in English and pilot tested in the UK and/or
Ireland. In the 1993 survey, for example, a UK pilot survey of 200 plants was
undertaken (Roper et al., 1996, p. 63), while the 1996 survey was pilot tested with 100
plants (Roper and Hewitt-Dundas, 1998, p. 64)10. Following the pilot surveys and
subsequent minor changes to the questionnaires German research staff with
considerable experience of innovation surveys undertook translation into German.
The German questionnaires were pilot tested in Germany and, wherever possible,
back-translated by a native German speaker into English.
5. Benchmarks: Innovation Objectives and Constraints
In 1999, and perhaps reflecting the increasingly globalisation of markets for
manufacturing goods (e.g. Best, 1991), plants’ innovation objectives were broadly
similar across the study regions. Figure 1 gives the proportion of all manufacturing
plants in the study regions indicating that each innovation objective was either
‘important’ or ‘very important’ in 1999. More than three-quarters of manufacturing
plants in each area give priority to extending their product ranges and increasing
market share (Table 2, Figure 1). Surprisingly, however, given its prominence in
recent EU policy documents such as Agenda 2000, the development of
environmentally friendly products was plants’ lowest priority with only a quarter of
plants in each study region seeing this as ‘important’ or ‘very important’ (Figure 1).
10 No pilot survey was undertaken for the 1999 survey in the UK and Ireland as the questionnaire was
almost identical to that used in the 1996 survey.
11