Reasons for innovating in New Zealand

Percentages are of all innovating New Zealand businesses in each business size or industry category.
Business size: Defined by rolling mean employment (RME) count.
Results for the commercial fishing; mining; electricity, gas, water, & waste services; telecommunications; and insurance industries should be treated with caution due to the small number of businesses in these categories.

Note: All counts in this survey were randomly rounded to base 3 to protect confidentiality, so actual figures may differ from those stated. Due to rounding, some figures may not sum to totals. Sub-industries (indented) carry higher sample errors, and should therefore be treated with caution. Percentages will add to more than 100 percent as businesses can use more than one reason.

Enterprise: a business or service entity operating in New Zealand. It can be a company, partnership, trust, estate, incorporated society, producer board, local or central government organisation, voluntary organisation, or self-employed individual.

Last financial year: for this survey, refers to the last financial year for which the business had results available at August.

Innovation: the development or introduction of any new or significantly improved activity for this business. This includes activity to improve products, processes, and methods that this business was the first to develop and those that have been adopted from other organisations.

For the Business Operations Survey 2013, innovation is the development or introduction of new or significantly improved:

goods or services – sometimes referred to as product innovation. Does not include selling new goods or services wholly produced and developed by other businesses
operational processes – the method of producing or distributing goods or services. This is sometimes referred to as process innovation
organisational/managerial processes – significant change in the business strategy, structure, or routine. Sometimes referred to as organisational innovation
marketing methods – intended to increase the appeal of goods or services for specific market segments, or to gain entry to new markets. Sometimes referred to as marketing innovation.

Reference period
The survey was posted out in August 2013. We collected information for the last financial year for which the business had data available at that point.

Please note for the purposes of visualising this data, Figure.NZ has combined tables that had been placed over two sheets by Statistics New Zealand
For example: Table 31 and Table 31 Continued have been combined.

At URL provided, select 'Business Operations Survey: 2013 – detailed tables ' from the right-hand column