Brussels, 26 March – The European Commission today released its Innovation Union Scoreboard revealing that whilst the EU as a whole has improved its innovation performance since the last Scoreboard, the gap between innovation leaders and innovation followers has grown.
Brussels, 26 March – The European Commission today released its Innovation Union Scoreboard revealing that whilst the EU as a whole has improved its innovation performance since the last Scoreboard, the gap between innovation leaders and innovation followers has grown.
All members of the EU are monitored by the report, as well as Croatia, Iceland, FYR Macedonia , Norway, Serbia, Switzerland and Turkey. Each Member State is analysed by eight innovation dimensions: human resources; research systems; finance and support (‘Enablers’); firm investments; linkages & entrepreneurship; intellectual assets (‘Firm activities’); innovators and economic effects (‘Outputs’).
Sweden, Germany, Denmark and Finland were identified as the Union’s innovation leaders, with Bulgaria, Romania, Latvia and Poland at the bottom of the table. Overall, the EU annual average growth rate of innovation performance reached 1.6% over 2008-2012, despite the economic crisis. The largest growth average was found in Estonia at 7.1%.
Whilst innovation growth has occurred in almost all countries (both Greece and Cyprus recorded negative growth), the Scoreboard notes that convergence between leaders and followers has halted, with less innovative countries no longer catching up with leading nations. Further, all European countries were found to fall behind the international leaders: the USA, South Korea, Japan and Switzerland.
Giving further evidence of their importance to EU economies, SMEs were found to be by far the most innovative actors, though it was found that decreases in business and venture capital investment have hit their performance hard.
Click to access the full Innovation Union Scoreboard 2013.