How innovative are EU countries? You can find out in the latest European Innovation Scoreboard released by the European Commission, which provides a comparative analysis of innovation performance in EU Member States, other European countries, and regional neighbours. It assesses relative strengths and weaknesses of national innovation systems and helps countries identify areas they need to address.
The innovation report stays that the EU is continuing to catch up with global innovation leaders. But innovation is still held back by low business investment and restrictive framework conditions, notably affecting SMEs.
Sweden is once more the EU innovation leader, followed by Denmark, Finland, Germany and the Netherlands. The fastest growing innovators are Latvia, Malta, Lithuania, the Netherlands and the UK.
As far Romania is concerned, it was ranked as a Modest Innovator. The EC report says that innovation performance increased until 2010, after which it has been declining.
Innovation performance in 2015 is at a significantly lower level than in 2008. The development of Romania’s relative performance to the EU has closely followed the development of the innovation index. Over time, the relative performance has worsened from almost 50% in 2008 to 34.4% in 2015.
Romania is performing well below the average of the EU on all dimensions and all indicators. The weakest relative performance in terms of dimensions is Linkages and entrepreneurship, while in terms of indicators, the worst relative performance is observed for PCT patent applications in societal challenges and PCT patent applications.
Romania performs similar to the EU average for a number of indicators, in particular Youth with upper secondary level education, Exports in medium & high tech products, and Employment in fast-growing firms in innovative sectors.
Performance has increased the most for the innovation dimension Human resources (4.4%). High growth at the indicator level is observed for License and patent revenues from abroad (17%) and Community designs (14%). The strongest declines in performance are observed in Venture capital investments (-23%), Sales share of new product innovations (-21%), Non-R&D innovation expenditures (-17%), SMEs innovating in-house (-17%), and SMEs with product or process innovations (-17%).
Provisional CIS 2014 data show improved performance for two indicators.
The overall impact on the innovation index is expected to be positive with the index possibly increasing from 0.180 to 0.188 assuming that for the other indicators performance would not change.