Brussels, 13 September – The European Commission has developed a new ‘Indicator of Innovation Output’ for benchmarking national innovation policies and monitoring EU performance compared to its main international competitors. The indicator is to be used to keep Europe on track with its ‘Innovation Union’ 2020 Flagship Initiative.
Brussels, 13 September – The European Commission has developed a new ‘Indicator of Innovation Output’ for benchmarking national innovation policies and monitoring EU performance compared to its main international competitors. The indicator is to be used to keep Europe on track with its ‘Innovation Union’ 2020 Flagship Initiative.
The indicator will help to monitor Member State progress towards the 2020 Flagship goals, such as increasing total public and private investment in R&D to 3% of EU GDP. The indicator should help policy-makers to establish and reinforce actions to remove bottlenecks preventing innovators from translating ideas into successful products and services.
Four components make up the new ‘output-focused’ indicator:
- Technological Innovation (measured by Patent Co-operation Treaty [PCT] patent applications per billion GDP);
- Employment in knowledge-intensive industries (focusing on highly skilled labour as percentage of total employment);
- Competitiveness of knowledge-intensive goods and services (based on contribution of trade-balance of high-tech and medium-tech products in total trade balance, and knowledge-intensive services as a share of total service export);
- Employment in fast-growing firms of innovative sectors (providing an indication of the dynamism of fast-growing firms in innovative sectors, compared to all fast-growing business activities).
Initial results show Sweden, Germany, Ireland and Luxembourg leading the way for innovation in the EU. Although a majority of countries have improved their innovativeness since 2010, large disparities remain. The graph, below, shows Member State performance in 2010 and 2011, as a percentage of the EU average (2010 EU average = 100%).
The output indicator will support the current criteria of the Innovation Union Scoreboard (IUS), which includes inputs, throughputs and outputs. From next year, the IUS and Innovation Indicator scores will be released together.
Development of the new indicator was requested by Heads of State and Government at a European Council meeting in March and was requested to be completed before they meet to discuss Innovation on 24 October.
For more information, see the European Commission Press Release.