The chart illustrates the various strategies employed by different industries in New Zealand to safeguard their intellectual property. It also reveals quantifiable links between trade in goods/services and their dependence on intellectual property.
Use the Survey years control below the chart to view a single survey year, several years, or all years combined. When more than one year is selected, each flow shows the sum of firm counts across the selected surveys. Switch Measure to "% of industry responses" to compare industries of different sizes: each flow then shows the method's share of that industry's responses. Industry level switches between the 18 ANZSIC divisions (the default) and the 24 sub-industries the survey breaks out; "All" shows both levels together, which double counts businesses on the method side. Click any node in the chart to focus connected flows. Use Reset view above the chart to return to the initial view.
Each year, Tatauranga Aotearoa (Statistics New Zealand) gathers this data as a component of the Business Operations Survey (BOS) to enhance their comprehension of business practices and behaviours that could potentially influence performance within each sector.
Methodology & Data Source
Information is sourced from approximately 9,000 New Zealand companies, randomly chosen from a pool of 48,000 companies. These selected businesses have a minimum of six employees and have been active within their respective industries for over a year.
Values are Stats NZ estimates of the number of businesses in each industry that reported using a method, randomly rounded to base 3. A business can report several methods and is counted once per method, so an industry's total is a count of responses rather than of businesses. The dataset covers eight biennial survey waves (2007, 2009, … 2021); multi-year views sum the counts of the selected waves, so a business that answered several waves is counted once per wave. The percentage view divides each flow by its industry's total responses over the selected waves, so every industry sums to 100%.
The industry list mixes ANZSIC divisions with sub-industries of six of them (agriculture, forestry and fishing; manufacturing; wholesale trade; information media and telecommunications; financial and insurance services; professional, scientific and technical services). A business in a sub-industry is also counted in its division, so the chart shows one level at a time by default. Dataset v1.13 (22 September 2026) separates "Agriculture, forestry, and fishing support services" from the division total, which earlier versions had merged under one label.
Data Source: Statistics New Zealand, table reference
BUO021AA, last updated 25 March 2022.