Engineering news
Sweden is Europe’s most innovative nation, while the continent as a whole is rapidly closing the gap with its international competitors in terms of innovation, the EU has said.
The findings of the pan-European “Innovation Scoreboard” were published this week by the EU. The Scoreboard, which has been compiled every year since 2007, takes into account factors such as education levels, number of scientific publications, R&D expenditure, venture capital and patent applications to determine an innovation rating for each EU member state.
Sweden was rated the best European country for innovation for the third year in a row, nudging Germany, Denmark, and Finland aside in the top tier of countries performing “well above” the EU average.
The UK managed to qualify as an above average “Innovation Follower”, slightly ahead of France and Ireland, but behind Holland and Belgium, which were all rated in the same category. The Scoreboard places countries into four groups: innovation leaders, followers, moderate innovators and modest innovators
Bottom of the pile for innovation were Poland, Latvia, Romania and Bulgaria, which all scored “well below” the average rating. However, all European member states showed an improvement in their innovation rating - with the exception of Greece and Cyprus, whose innovation performance declined at an rate of 1.7% and 0.7% respectively last year. The average innovation increase across the continent for 2012 was 1.6%.
Commissioner Máire Geoghegan-Quinn, responsible for Research, Innovation and Science, warned against the widening gap between EU countries’ ability to innovate. She said: "Innovation should now be at the heart of all Member States' policy agendas. Our latest State of the Innovation Union report shows we made progress in 2012 on some of the big ticket items like the Unitary Patent and new rules for venture capital funds, but we need to go further in order to avoid an innovation divide in Europe."
Internationally, Europe as a whole lags behind South Korea, the US and Japan for being innovative, but since 2008 has almost halved the gap with the US and Japan. The report also notes that the EU’s innovation lead over China is declining, remained stable with Brazil and India, and increased compared to Australia and Canada.
This interactive dashboard lets you delve into the statistics in full detail if you want to check individual countries’ progress and compare and contrast different aspects of the scores.
