Measuring the unmeasurable: a country's non-R&D expenditure on product and service innovation

Knowledge about non-R&D expenditure on innovation activities such as patenting and licensing, design, trial production, tooling-up, manpower training, market research and investment in fixed assets, is still extremely sparse. Questions about the latter were very poorly answered in the recent Community Innovation Survey (CIS). With the aid of information regarding the quality of replies, we estimate missing values and then reach a national estimate of 1992 innovation expenditure in the manufacturing and service industries of the Netherlands. For policy discussions as well as for modelling, it is interesting to note that expenditure on product-related R&D (6,24 billion guilders) represents about 26% of total product (and service) innovation expenditure, the latter including 125 billion guilders for investment in fixed assets.