European innovation scoreboard

The European innovation scoreboard provides a comparative analysis of innovation performance in EU countries, other European countries, and regional neighbours. It assesses relative strengths and weaknesses of national innovation systems and helps countries identify areas they need to address. The European innovation scoreboard 2020 was released on 23 June 2020.

European innovation scoreboard 2020

The 2020 edition of the innovation scoreboard highlights that the EU’s innovation performance continues to increase at a steady pace, with growing convergence between EU countries. On average, the innovation performance of the EU has increased by 8.9% since 2012. Performance increased in 24 EU countries since 2012, with the biggest increases in Lithuania, Malta, Latvia, Portugal and Greece.

Sweden continues to be the EU innovation leader, followed by Finland, Denmark and the Netherlands. This year Luxembourg (previously a strong innovator) joins the innovation leaders, while Portugal (previously a moderate innovator) joins the group of strong innovators.
This year’s scoreboard is marked by the United Kingdom’s withdrawal from the EU. This has had a small impact on the EU’s average innovation performance, but the relative performance of EU countries in relation to EU’s global performance remains unaffected.

At the global level, the EU has surpassed the United States for the second time. The EU continues to have a performance lead over the United States, China, Brazil, Russia, South Africa, and India. Since 2012, the EU’s performance gap with South Korea, Australia and Japan has increased, while the EU’s performance lead over the United States, China, Brazil, Russia and South Africa has decreased.

The EIS 2020 applies the same methodology as last year’s edition. However, results should not be compared across editions due to data revisions. Time series of the results are presented in the current edition which compare tracked performance since 2012 based on the most recent data.

Access the FULL innovation scoreboard here

Compliments of the European Commission.