Innovation performance in the European Union has increased between 2016 and 2023. During the past year, however, growth has been progressing at a slower pace compared to the previous one, according to the latest European Innovation Scoreboard: the annual report that provides a snapshot of the state of research and innovation in the EU countries and in the international context.
Specifically, the EIS divides the EU Member States into four groups based on their performance scores: innovation leaders, strong innovators, moderate innovators, and emerging innovators.
In the first group, which includes countries with innovation performance well above the EU average, Denmark stands out with the best performance, followed by Sweden – dropped to second place after a few years in leading position – Finland, the Netherlands and Belgium.
Austria, Germany, Luxembourg, Ireland, Cyprus and France are strong innovators, performing above the EU average. Estonia, Slovenia, Czech Republic, Italy, Spain, Malta, Portugal, Lithuania, Greece and Hungary are moderate innovators while Croatia, Slovakia, Poland, Latvia, Bulgaria and Romania remain in the group of emerging innovators.
The distribution of Member States across performance groups in the European Innovation Scoreboard remains largely unchanged compared to the previous year. More generally, the Report shows that over the past eight years performance differences between the Member States have narrowed, most strongly within the groups of strong innovators and moderate innovators. However, the distribution of the four groups still exhibits geographic concentration: Northern and Western Europe are home to innovation leaders and most strong innovators whereas the States belonging to the groups of moderate and emerging innovators are mostly located in Southern and Eastern Europe.
The European Innovation Scoreboardalso focuses on the global positioning of the EU, showing that the European Union has closed part of its performance gap with South Korea – which is the best performing country in the EIS 2023 in terms of innovation – as well as Canada, the United States and Australia.
The Report includes an in-depth analysis of the performance of each Member State, including Italy, highlighting strengths and weaknesses.
With performance at 90.3% of the EU average, our country is above the average of the moderate innovators. Italy’s performance is increasing at a rate higher than that of the EU and the performance gap with other more advanced European countries is narrowing. The strengths of our research and innovation system include resource productivity, a high number of cited publications and public-private co-publications, while the weaknesses include a low percentage of population with tertiary education, the low mobility of human resources in science and technology as well as the insufficient research and development expenditure in the business sector.
