Innovation Union Scoreboard (IUS) Index assesses 27 European countries on how do they perform in innovation sphere and its subdivisions. By monitoring innovation progress across the EU27 member countries, as well as Iceland, Croatia, Norway, Serbia, Switzerland, Turkey and the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia IUS attempts to build strong base to policy discussions and decisions at EU and national level. Measurement framework of IUS embraces in total 25 indicators serving as proxies for 8 innovation dimensions grouped into 3 pillars. Enablers pillar captures the main factors of innovation performance which are external to the company and cover three innovation dimensions: Human resources, Open, excellent and attractive research systems as well as Finance and support. Firm activities pillar captures the firm-level innovation efforts, grouped into the following innovation dimensions: Firm investments, Linkages & entrepreneurship and Intellectual assets. Outputs pillar covers the results of firms’ innovation efforts in two innovation dimensions: Innovators and Economic effects.
The overall ranking within the EU remained relatively stable, with Switzerland at the top, followed by Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Germany. Over the period 2001-2015, long-term innovation performance has had a clear upward trend for the EU as a whole, with highest positive growth for Latvia, Malta and Bulgaria and the most negative growth for Romania.
EU innovation performance has been increasing at an average annual rate of 0.6% between 2001 and 2015, but growth has not been equally strong across all dimensions and subdimensions. The largest growth is observed in Human resources (2.6%) and Research systems (1.7%). Growth in Intellectual assets and Innovators has been modest (1% and 0.5%, respectively). innovation performance in Finance and support demonstrates negative growth rate (-1.6%), caused by sharp decline in Venture capital investments (-5.7%). Moreover, negative growth occurs in Firm investments (-0.2%) and Linkages (-0.4%).
The Innovation Union Scoreboard places Member States into the four country groups: Innovation leaders, Innovation followers, Moderate innovators and Modest innovators. The Innovation Leaders have balanced innovation systems with strengths in all dimensions, chased by the Innovations followers, the Moderate Innovators and the Modest Innovators. Performance differences, however, can be insignificant between the different performance groups, in particular for Human resources, Research systems, Innovators, and Economic effects between the Innovation Leaders and Innovations followers, for Firm investments between the Innovations followers and Moderate Innovators, and for Human resources and Intellectual assets between the Moderate and Modest innovators.
IUS is one of the tools aimed at measuring of knowledge resources (or intellectual capital), which gain importance in the today's economy, across different countries. The other popular indices include Global Competitiveness Index, Knowledge Economy Index, Global Innovation Index.
Research and Development (R&D) is the field of statistics comprising data on science, technology and innovation. This data is of great significance in the modern economy as it helps to build broad and comprehensive vision of innovation activity that is acknowledged by the most of developed and developing countries as the key driver behind the economic growth and competitiveness. That is why, policymakers try to induce innovation activity by focusing on the role of technology, information and learning in economic performance or, in other words, introducing the concept known as "knowledge-based economy". To monitor the progress of moving...
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