EU Member States improve overall innovation performance average, while the Swiss continue to dominate as European innovation leaders.
In the latest European Innovation Scoreboard, the results are promising all over Europe, where innovation performance continues to improve. On average, the score has increased by 12.4% since 2014, with lower performing countries improving at a higher rate than higher rated ones, thus slowly but surely reducing the innovation gap. However, it is Switzerland that continues to lead Europe in the sector as the number one most innovative country (see interactive tool for results). The top four EU countries that follow closely behind Switzerland are Sweden, Finland, Denmark and Belgium.
Switzerland’s strengths are in Attractive research systems, Human resources and Intellectual assets. For these, three indicators include International scientific co-publications, Foreign doctorate students, and Lifelong learning. Most recently, relative innovation performance has declined, mostly due to reduced performance for Government support for business R&D, Employment in knowledge-intensive activities, Knowledge-intensive services exports, and Environment-related technologies.
On average, the Innovation Leaders are located in Northern and Western Europe, while the moderate and emerging innovators are in the South and in the East. Compared to the rest of the world, South Korea is the most innovative country on the globe, with a 21% higher performance rate than the EU average. Compared to 2020, the EU has fallen behind the United States, but continues to stay ahead of China, Brazil and Russia (see 2020 Scoreboard report).
The European Innovation Scoreboard provides a comparative country analysis of innovation performance by assessing strengths and weakness of national and regional innovation systems. The 2021 scoreboard is based on a new framework and includes two new indicators, which are two of the EU’s top priorities: digitalisation and environmental sustainability. The regional innovation scoreboard (RIS) also showed promising results, with the most innovative region being Stockholm, Sweden, while Zürich, Switzerland rounds out the top five. The RIS also uses four new indicators: individuals with basic digital skills, employed ICT specialists, air emissions in industry and innovation expenditures per person employed. These four measures help to bring innovation measures in line with both the goals of the EU’s Green Deal and that of the EU’s Digital Decade. Out of the 240 regions taken into consideration, 225 saw their innovation performance increase. This is a hopeful sign, since research and innovation are a core part of the EU response to the Covid-19 crisis.
These objectives also align with the European Research Area (ERA), which aims to create a single and borderless market for research, innovation and technology based on national and regional excellence. The newly launched initiative for a specific European Innovation Area, to complement that of the ERA and the European Higher Education Area, calls for stakeholder input on how to strengthen Europe’s global innovation standing. Contributions from the start-up community, and from the K4I networking platform have started this discussion. Further proposals are expected during the fall of 2021.