Brussels, 15/02/2008 (Agence Europe) - The 2007 European Innovation Scoreboard, published by the European Commission's DG Enterprise and Industry shows a continuing trend towards convergence in innovation within the EU. Five member states (Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Germany and the United Kingdom) continue to return excellent international results, rivalling the United States and Japan. At the same time, the large majority of the remaining member states are narrowing the gap between them and the leading nations and three new member states (Estonia, the Czech Republic and Lithuania) are on track to reach the level of the average EU performance within the next 10 years. The comparative report shows that the United States is still well ahead of the EU, but the gap is closing, particularly in investment in information and communication technology, broadband penetration, early-stage venture capital and international patents. The gap between the EU and Japan is also reducing, particularly with regard to the numbers of science and engineering graduates and broadband penetration.
The Innovation Scoreboard provides an annual comparative assessment of the innovation performance within the EU and also with other leading countries. A variety of indicators covering structural conditions, knowledge creation, companies' innovation input and innovation output (products, services and intellectual property). The 2007 scoreboard shows that in terms of performance over a five-year period, countries fall into four relatively homogeneous groups (the countries are listed in descending order according their innovation score): innovation leaders - Sweden (0.73), Switzerland (0.67), Finland (0.64), Iceland (0.62), Denmark (0.61), Japan (0.60), Germany (0.59), the United Kingdom (0.57), the United States (0.55); innovation followers- Luxembourg (0.53), Israel (0.50), Ireland (0.49), Austria (0.48), the Netherlands (0.48), France (0.47), Belgium (0.47), Canada (0.44); moderate innovators -Estonia (0.37), Australia (0.36), Norway (0.36), the Czech Republic (0.36), Slovenia (0.35), Italy (0.33), Cyprus (0.33), Spain (0.31); Catching-up countries - Malta (0.29), Lithuania (0.27), Hungary (0.26), Greece (0.26), Portugal (0.25), Slovakia (0.25), Poland (0.24), Croatia (0.23), Bulgaria (0.23), Latvia (0.19), Romania (0.18), Turkey (0.08). The average performance for the 27 EU member states is 0.45. The full version of the report is available at: http://www.proinno-europe.eu/metrics (E.H.)