Only around one of every four enterprises tried to innovate in a three-year period, with two-thirds of the rest saying this was because there was no compelling reasons to do so.

The National Statistics office reported on Tuesday that out of 1,888 enterprises, only 511 had some form of innovative activity between 2014 and 2016, either technical or non-technical.

Analysed by the size of the enterprise, smaller companies were far less likely to innovate than larger ones, with 24 per cent of those employing between 10 and 49, 36 per cent of those employing from 50 to 249, and 45 per cent of those employing more than 250 people.

Of the 1,377 that do not innovate, 1,259 said that there was no compelling reason to innovate – representing 91.4 per cent.

Another interesting aspect to emerge is how few of the companies reached out to other entities that might have been able to help them with innovation, especially when it came to technological innovation. Of the 363 firms which innovated in this sphere, only 52 had some form of cooperation agreement – of which 16 were with universities or higher education institutions, and 11 with government or public research institutes.