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The Regional Innovation Scoreboard (RIS) is a regional extension of the European Innovation Scoreboard, assessing the innovation performance of European regions on a limited number of indicators. The RIS 2017 covers 220 regions across 22 EU countries, Norway, Serbia, and Switzerland. In addition, Cyprus, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, and Malta are included at country level.
The RIS accompanies the European Innovation Scoreboard (EIS), which assesses performance of national innovation systems. Where the EIS provides an annual benchmark of the innovation performance of Member States, as well as other European countries and regional neighbours, regional innovation benchmarks are less frequent and less detailed due to a general lack of innovation data at the regional level. The Regional Innovation Scoreboard addresses this gap by providing statistical facts on regions’ innovation performance. Compared to the EIS, the RIS has a stronger focus on the performance of small and medium’‘sized enterprises (SMEs).
The RIS 2017 replicates the refined analytical framework of the European Innovation Scoreboard to the extent possible in terms of data availability. In addition, it introduces a more detailed breakdown of performance groups and offers a new toolbox with contextual data that can be used to analyse and compare structural differences between regions.
The new Scoreboard confirms that Europe’s most innovative regions are located in the most innovative countries. The most innovative region in the EU is Stockholm in Sweden, followed by Hovedstaden (Copenhagen) in Denmark, and South East in the United Kingdom. Some regional innovative hubs exist also in moderate innovator countries: Praha (Prague) in the Czech Republic, Bratislavský kraj (Bratislava) in Slovakia, and PaÃs Vasco (Basque Country) in Spain.