This report presents a selection of results from the Community Innovation Survey 2022-2024. Particular focus is placed on enterprises with 1-9 employees, so-called micro-enterprises, which are usually not included in the survey. The report also includes a brief section comparing enterprises that use artificial intelligence (AI) for research and development (R&D) or innovation activities with enterprises that are classified as innovative.

“More enterprises are using AI in their R&D or innovation activities. In 2025, 8 percent of enterprises stated that they used AI för these purposes, a clear increase from 2 percent in 2023. The results show that the use of AI in the field of innovation continues to grow, even though it is still occurring at a low level.”, says August Thimrén, statistician at Statistics Sweden (SCB).

Generally, we see that the industry groups with a high share of innovative enterprises also were the industry groups with a high share of enterprises that have used AI for R&D or innovation activities. For example, we see that the eight industry groups with the highest shares of AI-using enterprises that used AI for R&D or innovation activities also were among the ten industry groups with the highest share of innovative enterprises.

Among the innovation-active enterprises, we see that a lack of resources constituted a significant barrier to further innovation activities. In all size classes, roughly one quarter of the innovation-active enterprises perceived this as an obstacle. Approximately one quarter of medium-sized and large innovation-active enterprises also stated that reasons other than insufficient resources had hindered additional innovation activities.

Among the ten industry groups with the highest share of enterprises that had introduced at least one innovation with some environmental benefit, eight belong to the industrial sector – six of which were part of manufacturing – and two belonged to the service sector. Among the ten industry groups with the lowest share of enterprises that had introduced at least one innovation with some environmental benefit, nine were in the service sector and one was in manufacturing. The industrial sector generally has a greater environmental impact than the service sector. The higher share of environmentally innovative enterprises in the industrial sector could potentially be explained by the face that these enterprises, on average, had a greater environmental impact and may therefore have had more scope for innovations that reduce their environmental footprint.

Community Innovation Survey 2022–2024 (pdf)