Innovation Efforts

Innovation Efforts

Introduction

Overall, the EU improves its performance and innovation continues to close the gap with the United States and Japan. This is the main message of the eighth annual scoreboard of innovation. On the other hand, if some EU Member States continue to improve their individual performances, others still need considerable effort. It should also be noted that the latest Scoreboard is based essentially on data covering the years 2006 and 2007 and that, therefore, the indicators do not yet reflect the impact of the current economic crisis on the performance innovation.

In its continuing efforts to develop more comprehensive measures of performance in innovation, the team behind the dashboard has revised its methodology and tried to develop new indicators. The measures included in the 2008 dashboard cover different dimensions of innovation:

availability of human resources and public and private funding - the "generators of innovation", excluding individual enterprises;

business investment, collaboration between business and public sector organizations, entrepreneurship, intellectual property rights arising from innovation - the "business activities", or innovation efforts directly provided by them, and

The number of firms which introduced innovations in the market or have entered into their own activities and the effects of innovation on the economy - the "results" of business innovation (Europa, 2012).

Progress

The dashboard classifies EU countries into four groups, based on a composite index called 'index summary innovation. " These are the champions of innovation, whose performance is well above the average EU-27 countries followers, whose performance is less strong, but still above the EU average, the Moderate innovators, whose performance is below the EU average and, finally, the catching-up countries that improve their performance in innovation, although they remain well below the average of EU-27.

Current performance in innovation does however reflect the situation at some point, so the dashboard also shows the progress of each country over a period of five years. All, except Denmark, have improved their performance in innovation over the past five years. Overall, these are the countries that are catching up the fastest growing, while the champions of innovation recorded the slowest growth. In each group, however, some countries stand out with lower growth than other countries in the same group (Innovation.publi, 2011).

Convergence of innovation performance

The colors represent different groups of countries: countries in green are "champions of innovation", those in yellow are "innovation followers", while the orange and blue correspond to "moderate innovators" ...