The Regional Innovation Monitor (RIM), an initiative of the European Commission's Directorate General for Enterprise and Industry, has the objective to describe and analyse innovation policy trends across EU regions. RIM provides detailed information on regional innovation policies for 20 EU Member States based on the work of a network of experts.

The Regional Innovation Monitor (RIM) project is launched in the context of the objectives set in the European Commission's Europe 2020 strategy and specifically the Innovation Union flagship action -recently this initiative has celebrated its first anniversary. It provides detailed information on regional innovation policies for 20 EU Member States. Thus, RIM does not cover the seven Member States with only local governments, namely, Cyprus, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta and Slovenia. In 2010, it was published the 2009 Regional Innovation Scoreboard (RIS), which published that Spain, Italy and the Czech Republic are the most heterogeneous countries, with regions where innovation performance varies from low to medium-high.

The core of the RIM service is a knowledge base of information on some 200 regions, including an 'inventory' of regional innovation policy measures, policy documents and organisations; a single access point for good practice dissemination on regional innovation policy in Europe; an on-line interregional comparison of innovation performance and governance trends by means of the benchmarking tool, and a new communication platform for innovation.

RIM has been created with the overall objective to improve competitiveness of EU regions through increasing the effectiveness of their innovation policies and strategies. It does so by providing policymakers and other innovation stakeholders with the analytical framework and tools for evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of regional policies and regional innovation systems.