The latest – and last – R&D Scoreboard was published by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) on 25 November 2010. The R&D Scoreboard is an annual investigation of the top 1,000 UK and top 1,000 global corporate investors in research and development and is endorsed by a number of organisations, including the R&D Society. On publishing the Scoreboard, BIS announced that it was not going to publish any further editions. In 1 December 2010’s issue of Research Fortnight, David Kingham, past Chair of the R&D Society, commented on behalf of the Society that the Government does need to ensure it has methods to monitor the effects of its R&D policies.
The scoreboard shoes that the top one thousand UK companies invested more than £25.3bn on developing new products, services and productivity in 2009; spend by the UK companies listed decreased by 0.6 per cent in 2009 – a smaller decrease than some commentators thought would occur due to the economic downturn. The scoreboard found that the decrease was largely due to lower spend by firms in fixed line telecommunications, banking, aerospace and defence sectors, with automobiles and parts, software and computer services and technology hardware and equipment increasing their overall R&D investment in 2009. 78% of global R&D occurs in five countries: the US; Japan; Germany; France and the UK.
The 2010 R&D Scoreboard is published on the BIS website and is free to access.
