Brussels, 01/10/2001 (Agence Europe) - On Monday, the European Commission published its "2001 European Innovation Scoreboard" assessing the strengths and weaknesses in the capacity for innovation of each Member State and the European Union as a whole. The scoreboard shows that all member States are improving, with some achieving world class performance, but the Union as a whole still lags behind the United States and Japan. The main weaknesses singled out by the Commission are the relatively weak investment in R&D by business and the low level of high-tech patenting activity.
The Innovation Scoreboard uses 17 indicators covering four different areas - human resources; the creation of new ideas; sharing and implementing knowledge; and venture capital, manufacturing and markets. The leading EU countries have made significant progress in terms of catching up with the United States and Japan in various indicators. The United Kingdom, France and Ireland are global leaders in training scientists and engineers; Finland, the Netherlands and Sweden are leaders in public R&D; Sweden is a company R&D leader; while the Netherlands, Sweden and Denmark come top of the bill in terms of the percentage of online households. Sufficient data is available for ten of the indicators to allow the trend over the past four to six years to be assessed. On average the indicators have greatly improved, with the exception of levels of public R&D spending, spending by business on R&D and value added from high-tech manufacturing. Comparing current EU and United States performance, the most significant United States advances include the level of R&D by business, levels of post-secondary education and the percentage of online households. The EU leads the US in the supply of new science and engineering graduates, and Japan in terms of public R&D spending and spending on information and communications technology equipment and services.
The Scoreboard shows that the overall innovation performance of the Union is improving, but there are still wide differences. Countries like Finland and Denmark whose performance was already strong are moving ahead, while Greece and Spain are rapidly catching up with the EU average, although from a relatively low level. The three largest EU economies (France, Germany and the UK) are improving, but at rates below the EU average. Overall, the gap between the best-performing and weakest-performing Member States still appears to be growing. Another area of concern - despite an increase in R&D spending by companies since 1996, the rapid R&D growth in the United States and Japan has widened the gap with Europe. Also, there are 7 times more US applications for high-tech patents in Europe than EU applications for high-tech patents in the United States, which is almost on a par with the gap between EU and Japanese patent applications.