The Innovation Union Scoreboard 2011 is the second edition of the Scoreboard, which replaces the European Innovation Scoreboard (published from 2001 to 2009). It provides a comparative assessment of the research and innovation performance of the EU27 Member States and the relative strengths and weaknesses of their research and innovation systems. In this way, it complements the Europe 2020 Annual Growth Survey and helps Member States assess areas in which they need to concentrate to boost their innovation performance.

The Innovation Union Scoreboard includes innovation indicators and trend analyses for the EU27 Member States, as well as for Croatia, Iceland, the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Norway, Serbia, Switzerland and Turkey. It also includes comparisons based on a more reduced set of indicators between the EU27 and 10 global competitors.
A measure for a country’s innovation performance is provided by the Summary Innovation Index, which divides the Member States into four country groups:
  • Innovation leaders: Sweden, Denmark, Germany and Finland, all show a performance well above that of the EU27 average.
  • Innovation followers: Belgium, the UK, Netherlands, Austria, Luxembourg, Ireland, France, Slovenia, Cyprus and Estonia all show a performance close to that of the EU27 average.
  • Moderate innovators: The performance of Italy, Portugal, Czech Republic, Spain, Hungary, Greece, Malta Slovakia and Poland is below that of the EU27 average.
  • Modest innovators: The performance of Romania, Lithuania, Bulgaria and Latvia, and is well below that of the EU27 average.
Countries at the top of the ranking for the composite innovation indicator share a number of strengths in their national research and innovation systems with a key role of business activity and public-private collaboration.  While there is not one single way to reach top innovation performance, it is clear that all innovation leaders, Finland, Sweden, Denmark and Germany, perform very well in Business R&D expenditures. Most of the innovation leaders also perform very well in other innovation indicators related to firm activities. The top EU innovator Sweden dominates in three out of 8 innovation dimensions: Human resources, Finance and support, and Firm investments; while Germany and Denmark perform best in two innovation dimensions each.
 
Read more on INTERREG or have a look at the report
 
Photo: Copyright Mr B - MMX (Flickr)