The European Commission’s latest innovation rankings highlight bright spots and problematic areas for individual regions, countries and the EU as a whole.
The European Commission (EC) has released the 2023 edition of the European Innovation Scoreboard (EIS) enabling an extensive comparison of innovation performance among EU Member States, as well as other European countries and global competitors. It is accompanied by the publication of the biannual Regional Innovation Scoreboard (RIS), which allows for a closer examination of the innovation performance within European regions.
The EIS 2023 is the third edition based on the new measurement framework introduced in 2021. The EIS 2023 covers all EU Member States, 11 other European countries, and, at a less detailed level, 11 global competitors. Compared to previous reports, Israel is no longer included due to a lack of statistical data. The EIS 2023 distinguishes between four main types of activities: framework conditions, investments, innovation activities, and Impacts – with 12 innovation dimensions, capturing in total 32 indicators. The detailed measures allow for interesting insights into where performance has or has not improved.
Compared to 2016, the performance of the EU has improved most in three aspects. Firstly it has seen an increase in the share of SMEs that have introduced innovations on the market or within their organisations. Secondly, the EU has strengthened collaborative innovation efforts, whether between firms, in terms of research collaboration between the private and public sector, or Job-to-job mobility of Human Resources in Science & Technology. Thirdly, the quality of financing and support has risen, due to a strong increase in both venture capital expenditures and government support for business R&D.
Among EU Member States, the Nordic countries continue to be in the lead, along with the Netherlands and Belgium. Outside Europe, South Korea has the strongest performance. Overall, Switzerland stays in first place, although the country’s lead over the EU average has narrowed. Likewise, at the regional level, Nordic regions lead in the EU with the Danish, Finnish and Swedish capital regions performing strongest alongside Oberbayern and Berlin in Germany. Three Swiss regions remain among the leaders, although the strongest-performing Zurich region has dropped out of the top 5 in Europe.
On a broader view, EU countries are rated as being 0.6 percentage points more innovative this year than in 2022, and 8.5 percentage points more innovative than in 2016. Another bright point is that performance differences between the leading and moderate Member States have narrowed from 2016 to 2023. Since last year, the global positioning of the EU has not significantly changed. The EU has closed part of its performance gap with Australia while China is now notably almost at par with the EU.
The improvement however does not paper over long-standing divides: distribution of performance groups still exhibits geographic concentration with northern and western Europe broadly performing better than Southern and Eastern Europe. Most importantly, the weakest countries in terms of innovation are not catching up: the emerging innovators category, which includes Romania, Bulgaria, Latvia, Poland, Slovakia and Croatia, are failing to narrow the gap with the more advanced “moderate innovators”.
Illuminating analysis is also provided on the sources of improvements or deterioration in performance over time with detailed country and regional profiles. Problematic areas for the Swiss innovation ecosystem include the worsening performance in terms of sales of innovative products and the quality of product innovators among its SMEs, as well as the number of design applications. On the other hand, since 2016, Switzerland has advanced most in terms of venture capital expenditures, job-to-job mobility of science and technology talent, and foreign doctorate students.