Lithuania ranks 25th in the Innovation Union Scoreboard (European Commission, 2015a) with no clear catching up with more advanced members of the EU. It can be considered a lower income country with specialisation in labour intensive traditional industries, facing the need for upgrading.
Lithuanian businesses invest insufficiently in the higher risk stages of the new product and service development - research and development (R&D) - and that leads to lower value-added based structure of the Lithuanian economy. Lithuania‘s indicators such as export of knowledge-intensive products and services, employment in knowledge-intensive companies, economic impact of innovation and other economic indicators of knowledge-intensive economy are far below the EU average.
To transform the economy towards new higher value-added activities, Lithuania has set itself the task of a significant increase of R&D&I activities in companies in the economy and to create incentives for greater economic impact on the development of innovation. In order to implement this task Lithuania is planning the investments from 2014-2020 EU Structural Funds for complex incentives of private investment in R&D&I development, focusing not only on the current innovators, encouraging them to create meaningful innovation, but also on companies operating in the lower value-added chain, encouraging them to shift to new product development, search for the new business niches. It is also sought to invest in new innovative businesses, in the promotion of variety of partnerships and in attraction of foreign direct investment in areas of smart specialization.
Inogeb LT, instrument for the development of innovation support services in Lithuania
The aim of Inogeb LT instrument is to promote technological progress and innovation by providing the innovation consulting and innovation support services for enterprises, to boost corporate innovation, at the same time seeking to develop an efficiently operating environment for dissemination of knowledge which would encourage the companies to carry out the activities of development of research and (or) development (hereinafter - R&D) and innovation (hereinafter - R&D&I) more actively.
