Brussels, 08/05/2015 (Agence Europe) - The number of innovative companies is falling in the EU, similarly to the level of venture capital investment, innovation by SMEs, request for patents, hi-tech product exports and sales of innovative products.
This is the conclusion drawn from the Innovation Union Scoreboard 2015 which the European Commission presented on Thursday 7 May. This EU innovation performance assessment subsequently draws up a less optimistic scoreboard than that for 2014 because the main conclusion is that “for the whole of the EU, innovation performance stalled last year”.
Although the Commission showed innovation in 2014 when it presented its “Regional Innovation Scoreboard 2014” (see EUROPE 11031), this time, it simply updated the most recent EU28 data. Overall, innovation performances stagnated throughout the EU, although in 15 member states they improved, and declined in 13.
The best performers remained the same: Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Germany, as did the worst: Romania, Bulgaria and Latvia. The changes in the scoreboard were sufficiently insignificant not to warrant any changes to the distribution of the member states in the four groups contained in the scoreboard (innovation champions, innovation followers, moderate innovators and modest innovators). It should be pointed out, however, that the disparity between the countries is getting smaller all the time.
For the remainder of the scoreboard, the conclusions drawn by the Commission for 2015 are almost identical as those for the previous year. This is also the case for the recommendations, which continue to highlight the need for member states to invest more in research and development but this time with the promise of a boost from the EU through the “Juncker Investment Plan”. (Jan Kordys)