On Thursday 22 September, the European Commission published the Innovation Performance Scoreboard for 2022. The table provides an annual comparative assessment of the performance of the European Union and selected third countries. The EU’s innovation performance has increased by 9.9 percentage points since 2015.
For the period 2015 to 2022, this performance has improved in all Member States, but with great disparities. These, however, have been reduced, according to the report. Member States were classified into four groups: emerging innovators, moderated innovators, strong innovators and innovation leaders. Only the group of emerging innovators did not catch up. Innovation performance improved the most in Cyprus, Estonia and Greece.
For the more recent period, compared to 2021, innovation performance has improved in 19 Member States and declined in 11.
On the international scene, between 2015 and 2022, the European Union has improved its relative position compared to all its main global competitors, except China.
Between 2021 and 2022, according to the report, the only global competitors to have improved their innovation performance are the European Union, Chile and South Africa.
According to the report, the available evidence does not yet allow conclusions to be drawn about the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on innovation performance. However, the pandemic has affected several of the indicators used to calculate this performance, as well as, most obviously, indicators that include Gross Domestic Product (GDP, which declined in 2020 compared to 2019 in 22 Member States).
The pandemic negatively affected exports, but this impact appears to have been less for medium and advanced technology exports and knowledge-intensive services exports compared to total exports.
Link to the report: https://aeur.eu/f/37y (Original version in French by Emilie Vanderhulst)