The European Innovation Scoreboard 2019 reveals that EU’s innovation performance continues to increase at a steady pace and further improvements are expected in the short term, even though progress remains uneven within the EU.
The report points out that:
- EU’s innovation performance increased by 8.8 percentage points since 2011, in particular due to improvements in terms of: new doctorate graduates; international scientific co-publications and broadband penetration.
More specifically innovation performance increased in 25 EU countries and decreased in three. Lithuania, Greece, Latvia, Malta, the United Kingdom, Estonia and the Netherlands are the countries in which innovation performance has increased the most while Romania and Slovenia the ones in which decreased the most. - Members states are classified into four performance groups based on their average performance scores: Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands, and Sweden are Innovation Leaders; Austria, Belgium, Estonia, France, Germany, Ireland, Luxembourg, and the United Kingdom are Strong Innovators; Croatia, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia and Spain are Moderate Innovators; Bulgaria and Romania are Modest Innovators.
- Performance of innovation systems is measured by average performance on 27 indicators. According to the Scoreboard since 2011, progress has been more robust in the innovation-friendly environment (due to broadband penetration); human resources (due to doctorate graduates); firm investments (due to enterprises providing ICT training) and attractive research systems (due to international co-publications). It is also worth to highlight that Venture capital expenditures have increased considerably while public R&D as share of GDP are below their 2011 level.
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Source: The European Commission