The European Innovation Scoreboard provides an annual comparative assessment of research and innovation performance of in EU Member States, as well as regional neighbours and selected global players. It ranks countries' performance in 27 separate indicators, such as innovation activities in companies, investment in research and innovation, human resource and friendliness of innovation environment, to classify countries into performance groups:

  • Innovation Leaders;
  • Strong Innovators - includes Belgium and UK from our project partnership;
  • Moderate Innovators - our partners - Greece, Latvia, Malta, Poland and Spain belong to this group;
  • Modest Innovators.

It is worth noting that between 2012 and 2019 our partner countries - Malta, Latvia and Greece were among those who made the biggest progress, where their innovation performance grew by more than 20 percentage points! For the EU as a whole, it increased by 8.9 percentage points in the same period. Spain, in turn was one of the countries to make best improvement compared to the 2019 edition.

When it comes to Innovation in small and medium-sized enterprises, Portugal is the European leader followed by Finland, Austria and Belgium. These countries are characterised by high shares of SMEs with innovative products and business processes.

We hope that our Action Plans will significantly contribute to further improvement of innovation performance in our partner countries and regions. 

You can find the full report here.