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European Innovation Scoreboard

The latest European Innovation Scoreboard for 2008 shows that the UK is only number 5 in Europe for innovation with Sweden heading the tables closely followed by Finland, Germany and Denmark. The scoreboard report also highlights the significant gap for Europe when compared with the US at 28% and Japan 38% higher overall.

In the eighth edition of the European Innovation Scoreboard (EIS), which provides a comparative assessment of the innovation performance of EU Member States, the methodology is revised compared to that of 2007 with a stronger focus on services, non-technological aspects, and outputs of innovation.

The analysis of trends over time is now based on changes in the absolute values of the indicators over a five year period, rather than the previous approach of measuring trends relative to the EU average.

Improved its performance, especially in human resources, broadband and venture capital

The report shows that the EU is making overall progress, with particularly strong increases in the numbers of graduates in science, engineering, social sciences and humanities. Other areas of strong increase are in broadband and in venture capital investments. (Note that the report does not include the impact of the economic downturn in 2008)

Decreasing innovation gap with the US and Japan

Based on a set of comparable indicators, the report shows that there has been a continued improvement in the EU's performance relative to the US and a recent improvement relative to Japan. Nevertheless, there remains a significant gap concentrated in four areas: international patenting, public private linkages, numbers of researchers and business R&D expenditures. There also appears to be some slowing down in the catching up with the US in recent years.

Development in innovation performance

The development in innovation performance has been calculated for each country and for the EU27 as a block using data over a five-year period. The figure below shows that the UK, while one of the Innovation Leaders, is now lagging behind it's peers and a long way behind the efforts of countries in the catch up zone.

In the UK, one of the Innovation leaders, innovation performance is above the EU27 average but the rate of improvement is below that of the EU27. Relative strengths, compared to the country’s average performance, are in Human resources, Finance and support, Firm investments and Linkages & entrepreneurship and relative weaknesses are in Throughputs, Innovators and Economic effects.

Over the past 5 years, Finance and support has been the main driver of the improvement in the UK innovation performance, in particular as a result from strong growth in Venture capital (22.9%) and Broadband access by firms (30.4%). Performance in Firm investments, Linkages & entrepreneurship, Innovators and Economic effects has worsened, in particular due to a decrease in Knowledge-intensive services exports.

The figure above shows that the UK's performance in level of innovators and the economic impacts of innovation are well below the EU average. It also shows that with the exception of finance and support, the UK's growth in all other areas lags behind.