The European Union performance in innovation is constantly improving. This is confirmed by the European Innovation Scoreboard (EIS), the annual report of the European Commission that, based on 32 indicators, comparatively assesses the performance in innovation of the EU Member States, 12 neighbouring European countries, including Moldova for the first time, and 11 selected global competitors.
Globally, the EU maintains a solid position, showing a good performance in most indicators, including SMEs which introduce product and process innovations as well as environment-related technologies. The report shows that, compared to its main global competitors, the European Union should increase efforts in dimensions such as intellectual assets, collaboration among innovative SMEs and R&D expenditure in the business sector.
In detail, although this improvement is remarkably different from one country to the other, the report shows that there has been a 10% increase since 2017 and a 0.5% increase from 2023 to 2024. Over one year, the national performances in innovation have increased in 15 Member States with Denmark confirming to be the most innovative country.
With regard to the Italian performance, the EIS 2024 edition has reported an increase as compared to the rest of the EU (+10%) with an overall improvement of 89.6% as compared to the EU average.
Finally, among the non-EU countries, Switzerland and South Korea are the most innovative, while China has overtaken Japan.
For further details, see:
- European Innovation Scoreboard 2024 [PDF] – European Commission
- Europe’s innovation performance steadily improving (europa.eu) – European Commission
