With VTT Innovation Studies joining the multi-national consortium in 2009, Finland recently became a partner-country in EMS. At the moment, VTT is preparing the second survey wave in Finland.

However, two decades ago, the Fraunhofer Institute for Systems and Innovation Research (ISI) already developed the survey Modernisation of Production in order to fill some empirical gaps and complement existing innovation surveys that were lacking sufficient detail at the time. In 2001, researchers at ISI took the initiative to make their survey international, which became the European Manufacturing Survey (EMS). The aim of EMS is to gather internationally comparable data by means of a standardized method and core questionnaire that is carefully translated in each participating country’s local language.

The latest survey EMS in 2009 was carried out successfully in 10 countries, incorporating data on 3,700 companies.