Meanwhile, the statistics show that the EU’s rate of catch-up with the US in innovation performance has levelled off, although as yet Europe maintains a clear lead over the emerging economies of Brazil, Russia, India and China, despite rapid improvements in China.
“The overall picture is positive, there are however some worrying signs and we will have to take this very seriously in developing the measures to accomplish what we just laid out in our Europe 2020 strategy,” said Vice-President Antonio Tajani, Commissioner for Entrepreneurship and Industry, as the 2009 European Innovation Scoreboard was published yesterday (March 17).
Overall, the Innovation performance of the European Union’s 27 members is converging. New EU members have made progress, but the worry is that the severity of the economic crisis may have since erased some of the gains. At the top of the EU innovation tree the performance of Denmark and the UK is “stagnating”, according to the Scoreboard.
“We need to step up our efforts if we’re to transform Europe into a really vibrant innovation economy,” Maire Geoghegan-Quinn, European Commissioner for research and innovation, said at a joint press conference with Tajani.
The Scoreboard should give ammunition to the Commission in its bid to maintain the EU target of investing 3 per cent of GDP on research. Tajani said increasing investment in research and innovation is the key to moving from crisis to sustainable prosperity. “That is why the Commission is maintaining the 3 per cent of GDP target for R&D investment in Europe and proposing realistic national targets with robust monitoring,” he said.
The scoreboard, based on data from 2007 and 2008, divides the EU 27 into four groups according to their standing in areas such as availability of finance for innovation, private sector investment in innovation, success in generating employment through innovation, and the level of exports and sales due to innovation activities.
The study also includes a comparison of the EU27 with the US and Japan, showing a significant gap remains with these two countries. As ever, the gap is due to relative EU shortcomings in international patenting, public-private partnerships, the numbers of researchers and private sector investment in R&D.
At the bottom of the EU rankings in Bulgaria, Latvia and Romania, or the “Catching-up countries” innovation performance was “significantly below” the EU27 average. However, all three have been rapidly closing the gap with the average, and the improvements in Bulgaria and Romania are the fastest of all member states.
Speaking at the press conference, Tajani highlighted Cyprus and Estonia, which both improved their performance from below average last year, to an above average this time. The main drivers of this growth for Cyprus included more finance, more government support for innovation projects and an increase in collaboration between innovating firms and the public sector. For Estonia, the key drivers were strong growth in private sector investment and the intellectual property rights generated as a result.
Cyprus and Estonia belong to the second rank countries or Innovation followers, along with Austria, Belgium, France, Ireland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Slovenia
The third group of Moderate innovators, whose performance falls below the EU average are the Czech Republic, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia and Spain.
The Maastricht Economic and Social Research and Training centre on Innovation and Technology (UNU-MERIT), which compiled the 2009 scoreboard for the Commission’s enterprise and industry directorate-general, said that another of its surveys suggested that the rapid advances in innovation performance made in many lower performing countries may not be maintained because of the severity of the economic crisis.
Geoghegan-Quinn was keen to emphasise that an economic crisis is no time to cut back on research and development spending and that strong R&D growth supports public finances.
“Raising R&D budgets is the route to recovery,” Geoghegan-Quinn said, pointing to Finland to illustrate the benefits this can bring.
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