Considering that the time period for the R&D survey mostly coincides with the globalfinancial crisis, you'd have to be pretty pleased with the nation's 13% increase between 2008 and2010.
During the 2010 reference year, Stats NZ reckons the total R&D spend was $2,444 million. Thesplit between sectors was business at $1,013m, government $629m and universities (though why thisdoesn't come under government is slightly strange) $802m.
The original statistics are
Services, particularly computer and other, lifted R&D by 18% to $481 in the 2010, reflectingsome of the strong below the headlines work that happens in this area. It would be interesting toknow the strength from Wellington's ICT sector in this increase.
Minister of Science and Innovation, Wayne Mapp, was pretty pleased to announce at last week'sNZBio conference dinner (where LanzaTech cleaned up the major prizes of the year) that total R&Dspend now represents 1.3% of the country's GDP.
Its well below the often documented and desired 2.5%, but up from 1.19% in 2008. Mapp wasespecially pleased to see the private sector increasing its R&D contribution more than thegovernment.
Sometimes it is difficult to compare private sector R&D spend between countries, andapparently often NZ businesses don't include items under such a spending column, but by comparison,the OECD national average R&D spend in 2008 was 2.33%.
The largest proportion of NZ's science research spend was in manufacturing at 18% or $449m.Interestingly, the private sector carried out most of this - 16%.
If you were a betting man, you'd have to hope that this implies there's a few interestingproducts about to emerge from this sector. They're not in the habit of spending for no particularreason - and a recession's as good a time as any to dust off an idea or two that may've beenlurking.