The New Zealand Herald - Innovate and make money, says survey A Statistics NZ survey of over 11,000 companies with more than 10 employees has turned up some interesting results:

- 60% of the respondents had invested in equipement or trainig aimed at developing or introducing innovative products, processes or services

- 91% of respondents said they'd embarked successfully on innovation related activities
- 80% of those said they had increased their range of goods/services as a result
- 79% reported higher profitability
- 75% reported improved efficiency

In a somewhat more counter-intuitive finding, innovation activities were also seemingly more pervasive in larger companies - however, as the survey's definition of larger companies is "more than 50 employees" (which would still be classified as a small company in Europe and the US), I'm not sure that all their survey found out was that companies that had been more successful (and thus had grown larger than the others) were more likely to be innovation-intensive companies. Nevertheless - some handy stats to keep in mind.