Report on the Survey on Innovation Activities in the Wood-Based Value Chain

Slovenia was identified as a region lagging in innovation, and this is particularly noticeable in the country's forest-based value chain. However, Slovenia's Smart Specialisation Strategy identified this industry as having a strong potential for growth. To leverage the innovation and growth potential of the chain, we need to gain a deeper understanding of existing innovation activities and the reasons for the lack of innovation activities. While there is a large body of literature on innovation activities of small (10-49), medium (50-249), and large enterprises (250+ employees), there is little known about micro-enterprises (i.e., less than 10 employees).

On the EU level, data on innovation activities are collected by the Community Innovation Survey (CIS), which has been carried out every two years since 2006. It is part of the European Union science and technology statistics and is carried out in several EU and ESS member countries, including Slovenia. However, CIS only includes enterprises with 10 or more employees. Since micro-enterprises represent more than 90 % of wood value chain enterprises in Slovenia, data on their innovation activities is needed to fully understand it. Thus, we carried out our own survey on innovation activities of Slovenian enterprises in the forest-based value chain based on the CIS instrument.

In this report, we present the methodology, data collection and descriptive statistics computed based on answers of participating enterprises. In addition, for selected items, we computed crosstabulations by enterprise sector and size. Finally, we summarise the findings and outline directions for future research.