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European Commission has released the European Innovation Scorecard, ranking the 25 Member States across five broad categories that measure different dimensions of innovation performance. Sweden, Finland and Switzerland are the European innovation leaders, followed by Germany and Denmark.
Innovation performance observed in the 25 Member States is extremely diverse. Most of the new member States are engaged in the catching up process, however following a low rhythm that will not allow for short-term convergence in Europe. In addition, would trends for the 25 Member States remain stable; the gap with the US will not close within the next 50 years.
The European Innovation Scoreboard 2005 comes with a strengthened methodology and a revised list of 26 indicators which are distributed among five categories that cover different key dimensions of innovation performance:
* Innovation drivers measure the structural conditions required for innovation potential,
* Knowledge creation measures the investments in R&D activities,
* Innovation & entrepreneurship measures the efforts towards innovation at the firm level,
* Application measures the performance expressed in terms of labour and business activities and their value added in innovative sectors, and
* Intellectual property measures the achieved results in terms of successful know-how.
With Finland, Sweden is an innovative leader within the EU, ranking first among the EU countries. Sweden has above average performance on all EIS indicators. It ranks in 1st place for innovation & entrepreneurship and IPR and in 2nd place for the three other EIS indices. For individual indicators, Sweden only ranks below the EU average for the share of university R&D financed by business and in high-technology exports as a percentage of total exports. Many of the trend results for Sweden are below the EU average, but this is usually from a starting point well above the average.
Finland is one of the EU’s two star performers on innovation, a position that it shares with Sweden. It ranks second out of the 25 EU countries. Finland ranks among the top three countries for each of the six EIS composite indices with the exception of applications. Consequently, Finland has no readily identifiable weaknesses, with above average results for all EIS indicators except one: the youth share of the Finnish population is 18.6%, which is below the EU country mean of 20.7%.