According to the results of the first edition of the new Innovation Union Scoreboard, the European Union is failing to close the innovation performance gap with its main international competitors, the US and Japan. Although the trends in most EU Member States are promising despite the economic crisis, progress is not fast enough and the Union will need to intensify efforts to bridge this gap, specially when it comes to support private sector and facilitate the exploitation of results from innovation.

These are some of the main conclusions from the 2010 Innovation Union Scoreboard (IUS) published by the European Commission under the Innovation Union initiative, replacing the former European Innovation Scoreboard (EIS). This new Scoreboard feeds into the recently published Annual Growth Survey to help Member States identify strengths and weaknesses and to boost innovation performance through their Europe 2020 National Reform Programmes.

The 2010 Scoreboard draws on 25 research and innovation-related indicators and covers the 27 EU Member States, as well as Croatia, Serbia, Turkey, Iceland, the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Norway and Switzerland. The indicators are grouped into three main categories:

• Innovation "Enablers", i.e. the basic building blocks which allow innovation to take place (human resources, finance and support, open, excellent and attractive research systems).
• Innovative "Firm activities" which show how innovative European firms are (firm investments, linkages & entrepreneurship, intellectual assets).
• Innovation "Outputs" which show how this translates into benefits for the economy as a whole (innovators, economic effects).

Comparing the indicators from EU member states, with those from US and Japan, results show that the European Union is not closing its innovation performance gap with its main competitors.  While the EU still maintains a clear lead over the emerging economies of India and Russia, Brazil is making steady progress, and China is catching up rapidly. Within the EU, Sweden is the most impressive performer followed by Denmark, Finland and Germany. The UK, Belgium, Austria, Ireland, Luxembourg, France, Cyprus, Slovenia and Estonia, in that order, are in the next group.

Main conclusions from Innovation Union Scoreboard (IUS)

According to the Innovation Union Scoreboard, the largest gap appears in the "Firm activities" category where the European Union lags behind in terms of public-private co-publications, business R&D expenditures, and, compared to Japan, in PCT (Patent Cooperation Treaty) patents. The priority should therefore be to create the regulatory and other framework conditions that will encourage more private sector investment and facilitate the exploitation of research results by the business sector, in particular through a more efficient patent system.

There is also a  particularly large gap in license and patent revenues from abroad, which are important indicator of economic dynamism. This shows the need to improve the economic model and functioning of the internal market and that the EU is producing fewer high impact patents than the US and Japan, not positioning itself sufficiently well in high global growth sectors.

Over the last five years, the strongest growth of the EU27 innovation indicators has been in open, excellent and attractive research systems (international scientific co-publications, high-impact publications, non-EU doctorate students) and intellectual assets (Community trademarks, PCT patents and Community designs).