Brussels, 01/02/2011 (Agence Europe) - The EU needs to innovate and needs to do so urgently: it is losing ground to traditional competitors and now also to newcomers. That is the message the European Commission is sending the Council due to meet in Brussels on Friday 4 February to discuss energy and innovation, with publication on Tuesday 1 February of the Innovation Union Scoreboard (IUS). The information on the scoreboard, presented at a press conference by Commission Vice-President with responsibility for Industry Antonio Tajani and Research, Innovation and Science Commissioner Máire Geoghegan-Quinn, show that the EU is failing to close the innovation performance gap with its main international competitors, the United States and Japan.
Although, a Commission press release says, the trends in most EU member states are promising despite the economic crisis, “progress is not fast enough”. While the EU still maintains a clear lead over the emerging economies of India and Russia, Brazil is making steady progress, and China is catching up rapidly. Within the EU, Sweden is the most impressive performer followed by Denmark, Finland and Germany (these are the “Innovation leaders”). The UK, Belgium, Austria, Ireland, Luxembourg, France, Cyprus, Slovenia and Estonia, in that order, form the next group (“Innovation followers”). Among the large EU countries, Italy, which jumps three places, Spain and Poland are part of the third group (“Moderate innovators”, below the EU27 average), and the fourth group (“Modest innovators”) is made up of Romania, Latvia, Bulgaria and Lithuania.
This is the first scoreboard under the Innovation Union initiative and replaces the former European Innovation Scoreboard (EIS). It feeds into the recently published Annual Growth Survey to help member states identify strengths and weaknesses and to boost innovation performance through their EUROPE 2020 National Reform Programmes.
Tajani said: “The Scoreboard shows that we need to step up our efforts in making Europe more innovative in order to catch up with our main competitors and recover the path of robust and sustainable growth”. He stressed that “the most important thing for each country is not its position in the league table of innovators, but rather the direction it is going in, its pace of growth and its ability to adapt to innovation”. He called on member states not to view the scoreboard as a success or failure.
Geoghegan-Quinn stated that “innovation is as essential to a successful modern economy as water is to life. It is at the core of economic policy-making and the main way economies create jobs”. The Scoreboard is a central plank of the EUROPE 2020 strategy. “We want member states”, she said, “to make full use of it to build on their strengths and to address weaknesses”.
In its press release, the Commission says that the 2010 Scoreboard draws on 25 research and innovation-related indicators and covers the 27 EU member states, as well as Croatia, Serbia, Turkey, Iceland, the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Norway and Switzerland. The indicators are grouped into three main categories: - “Enablers”, i.e. the basic building blocks which allow innovation to take place (human resources, finance and support, open, excellent and attractive research systems); - “Firm activities” which show how innovative Europe's firms are (firm investments, linkages and entrepreneurship, intellectual assets); - and “Outputs” which show how this translates into benefits for the economy as a whole (innovators, economic effects).
Comparing the indicators for the EU27, US and Japan shows that the EU27 is not closing its performance gap with its main competitors. The largest gap appears in the “Firm activities”, which shows that Europe's research and innovation gap lies primarily in the private sector. The priority should, therefore, be to create the regulatory and other framework conditions that will encourage more private sector investment and facilitate the exploitation of research results by the business sector, in particular through a more efficient patent system: the gap is particularly large and rapidly increasing in licence and patent revenues from abroad. The EU27 is, however, outperforming the US in public R&D expenditure and knowledge-intensive services exports. Over the last five years, the strongest growth of the EU27 innovation indicators has been in open, excellent and attractive research systems (international scientific co-publications, high-impact publications, non-EU doctorate students) and intellectual assets (Community trademarks, PCT patents and Community designs). (Gp/transl.rt)