For 20 years, the BIS (Department for
Business, Innovation and Skills) collected data on the top 1000 UK and global
companies investing the most in R&D. This was collated into a document
known as the R&D Scoreboard, and the data tables can be downloaded from the
now-archived BIS
website.
Financial statistics such as sales and
operating profit were also provided, as were the number of employees. These
could be compared with data from previous years to examine trends in R&D
investment over time and as a proportion of sales, profit, or per employee.
Alas, the final report was published in
2010, using data collected in 2009. David Willetts, Minister of State for Science
and Innovation at the time, explained
this was because “today’s companies better understand the importance of R&D
to their long-term success.” The second, more plausible reason given was “financial
pressures have made it necessary to reduce public spending” – resulting in the R&D
Scorecard being axed.
Albeit out-of-date, the 2010 report still
contains useful information for the active jobseeker. For example, of the top 1000
UK companies investing in R&D in the UK (including global companies with UK
subsidiaries), 260 were in the industry sectors of pharma/biotech, chemicals,
oil/gas producers, food producers or health care equipment/services.
This list of companies could be useful for identifying less
well-known small and medium-sized enterprises that may be accepting speculative
CVs through their website. The visualisation below plots UK R&D investment
against the number of UK employees. The tools on the right can be used to
filter for companies depending on size, and hovering over a datapoint reveals
the company name.
For interest, the alternative view below
plots the R&D expenditure per employee against the number of UK employees (for
which Google helpfully produces this great quote: “The joy of engineering is to find a straight line on a double logarithmic diagram”).
