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A study examines how Spanish companies innovate.
What is the purpose of this study?
The main purpose of this study is to analyse the role of companies
in the context of the Spanish scientific and technological development.
In previous projects of our research group
we have focused on
the institutions in charge of generating knowledge:
universities, public research centres.
This time we have chosen to focus on
the institutions in charge of transforming that knowledge
into goods, services and products for society.
We have analysed the overall production
of companies located in Spain between the years 1995 and 2005,
according to the information extracted
from the database Web of Science
that gathers the most important international magazines.
Companies from the biomedical sector tend to publish more
as it happens in their discipline.
While others in the, for example, technological sector
are more hesitant to publish
or at least they are to do so through scientific journals.
They could be using other channels
but not scientific journals, which is the source we have used.
Which are the basic characteristics of R&D in Spanish companies?
One advantage is that there are many Spanish companies
involved in the national scientific production.
In fact in the period analysed, 11 years, there are more than 1,000
companies with scientific production of some kind.
A less positive feature,
and probably where Spanish companies fall short,
is that when we classify these companies
and we reduce those 1,000 to the 50 most productive
we find very few genuinely Spanish companies in that list.
Which are the companies or fields that invest more in research?
Companies from the fields of Medicine, Pharmaceutical or Molecular Biology
represent in our case, in the studied sample,
65% of the overall production.
If to these disciplines we add Chemistry we find that 75%,
three fourths, of the overall production
is covered by these four disciplines.
This fact is, by itself, not very surprising.
Unlike the importance of these four disciplines
in this sector.
We know and it has been studied
that the weight of these disciplines is important
but in other sectors or geographic domains
this is not the case, like for Spanish companies.
What other conclusions can you draw from this study?
The region of Madrid is the area that contributes more companies
to the total of Spanish scientific and technological producers.
It is also the region that contributes more documents to the total.
From the point of view
of the international scientific collaboration,
United States is the main partner of these companies,
followed by European partners from neighbouring countries:
Great Britain, Germany, France.
Finally, I would also like to highlight as a peculiarity
that when Spanish companies embark on the venture
of carrying out a research project
they rarely choose another company as partner.
They normally opt for partners from other sectors,
like the university.
Or healthcare sectors, essentially hospitals.
(Music)