Abstract Economies, including the European Union, face the risk of losing ability to maintain their competitive positions on the global scale and of related inability to generate value added up to satisfactory degree. We therefore examine factors assumedly having positive impact on the domestic value added in exports, as a recently introduced key indicator of country's export competitiveness, reported in the TiVA database. The main aim of our paper is to test, for the selected countries, the relationships of the domestic value added in exports with the following factors: (1) number of patent applications per million inhabitants, (2) foreign direct investment per capita, (3) business expenditure on research and development as a percentage of GDP and (4) resource productivity as control variable. We prove by panel data analysis that the domestic value added in exports increases with an increase in all deployed independent variables as well as in control variable.