What Is High Tech? Meaning, Industries and Real Examples

TL;DR

• High tech means research-heavy: in official statistics, an industry is “high tech” when it spends a large share of its output on research and development (R&D), not because its products look futuristic.
• The OECD sets the yardstick: its taxonomy ranks industries by R&D spending as a share of value added and puts aerospace, scientific R&D, software publishing, pharmaceuticals and electronics at the top.
• Eurostat uses a similar list for Europe: pharmaceuticals, computer and electronic products, and aircraft and spacecraft count as high-tech manufacturing, while telecoms, IT services and R&D count as high-tech knowledge-intensive services.
• “High tech” and “tech company” are not the same thing: a drug maker is high tech by the official definition, and an app-based delivery service usually is not.
• It matters for jobs and growth: in 2022, 9.8 million people worked in high-tech sectors in the EU, about 4.9% of all employment.

Contents

1. What does high tech mean?
2. How the OECD measures high technology
3. Which industries count as high tech
4. Real examples of high-tech products
5. High tech vs tech companies
6. Why high tech matters for economies and jobs
7. FAQ

“High tech” sounds like a vibe: glass offices, robots, something with a chip in it. Statisticians, however, use it as a fairly precise label. This guide explains what the term means in everyday speech, how official bodies like the OECD and Eurostat define it, which industries qualify, and why governments track it so closely.

What does high tech mean?

In everyday language, high technology (or high tech) means products and processes built on advanced, recent science and engineering. They are usually complex to design, expensive to develop, and made by people with specialised skills. The “high” refers to the effort that goes into them: years of research, costly equipment and highly trained staff.

A useful pattern: high tech rarely stays high tech in price. Things that start as expensive niche products often become cheaper and widespread once production scales up. The research effort behind the next generation, though, stays high.

In economics and official statistics, the definition is narrower and measurable. An industry counts as high tech when it invests a large share of its output in research and development (R&D). That single number, called R&D intensity, is what separates a pharmaceutical plant from a bakery, even if both use modern machines.

How the OECD measures high technology

The most widely used framework comes from the OECD. Its taxonomy of economic activities based on R&D intensity (2016) measures R&D intensity as the ratio of R&D spending to value added in an industry. It then sorts both manufacturing and services into five groups: high, medium-high, medium, medium-low and low R&D intensity.

The industries at the top of the list, with their average R&D intensity across the countries studied (based on 2011 data), are shown below (OECD working paper, Table 1):

Put simply, in the top group, roughly a quarter to a third of the value an industry creates goes back into research. The 2016 version covers services as well as manufacturing, which is why software publishing appears next to aircraft.

Which industries count as high tech

In the EU, Eurostat applies the same logic to the European industry codes (NACE Rev. 2). Its high-tech classification of manufacturing industries groups factories by technological intensity, which Eurostat’s methodology notes define as R&D expenditure divided by value added.

Services get their own split. Eurostat’s high-tech aggregation lists “high-tech knowledge-intensive services” as film, video and music production, broadcasting, telecommunications, computer programming and consultancy, information services, and scientific research and development.

So when a report talks about “the high-tech sector”, it usually means these manufacturing and service groups added together. If you want the factory side in more detail, see our explainer on what high-tech manufacturing is.

Real examples of high-tech products

The official categories become clearer when you look at what they actually produce.

The World Bank uses a product-level version of the same idea for trade data. It defines high-technology exports as “products with high R&D intensity”, such as aerospace, computers, pharmaceuticals, scientific instruments and electrical machinery.

Note what is missing: robots on a car assembly line do not make car making a high-tech industry. Motor vehicles sit in the medium-high group. Using advanced tools and inventing them are measured differently.

High tech vs tech companies

In casual talk, “tech company” usually means a business that sells software, runs an online platform or has an app. The official high-tech label works differently, and the two overlap only partly.

• High tech but rarely called “tech”: a pharmaceutical manufacturer, an aircraft engine maker or a scientific research lab. They spend heavily on R&D and sit in the top group.
• Called “tech” but not always high tech: a company whose main business is delivery, retail or ride-hailing, even if it is run through an app. Official statistics classify a business by its main activity, so an online shop is still retail.
• Both: software publishers and makers of computer and electronic products.

The OECD data shows the nuance even inside IT. Software publishing is in the high R&D group, while IT and other information services sit in medium-high (OECD). Writing a new operating system and installing one for a client are not the same kind of work.

The OECD itself warns that R&D intensity is an imperfect proxy: many successful firms adopt technology they did not develop, and the list should not be read as a knowledge- or technology-intensity ranking. Eurostat, for example, classifies services as knowledge-intensive based on the share of workers with a university-level education (Eurostat).

Why high tech matters for economies and jobs

Governments track high tech because it is closely tied to productivity, exports and skilled employment.

• Jobs: according to Eurostat, 9.8 million people worked in high-tech sectors in the EU in 2022, or 4.9% of total employment. Women made up 32.8% of that workforce.
• Research spending: the EU spent €381.4 billion on R&D in 2023, equal to 2.2% of GDP, and businesses accounted for 66% of it (Eurostat). Sweden led at 3.6% of GDP. Since high tech is defined by R&D, this spending is a key indicator to watch.
• Trade: high-technology exports are a standard World Bank indicator, used to compare how much of a country’s manufactured exports come from research-heavy products (World Bank).

There are trade-offs. By definition, high-tech industries need large research budgets and specialised staff, and research spending does not guarantee a product that sells. Eurostat also publishes high-tech employment by region, so places can compare how they are doing.

The definition will keep shifting as research moves. AI is a good example: much of it is built in software publishing and R&D labs, both already high tech, but its effects spread into ordinary industries. For a look at how AI agents are starting to act inside the economy, see our explainer on the synthetic economy.

FAQ

About the Author

Vyara Stefcheva

Vyara Stefcheva is the founder and editor of Egorithms and an independent marketing expert. She follows how technology, AI and algorithms change the way people find, choose and buy, and writes about what that means for businesses and for the people who use them.

She has spent her career building marketing and business strategies for more than 300 brands across three continents. She built and exited a marketing agency and now works independently. She has taught more than 20,000 people through lectures, courses and corporate training, and speaks at conferences about AI and the future of the internet.

On her YouTube channel she tests new AI and marketing tools as they launch and gives each an independent verdict: adopt, watch or ignore.

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