This is the eighth edition of the European Innovation Scoreboard (EIS). The EIS is the instrument developed at the initiative of the European Commission, under the Lisbon Strategy, to provide a comparative assessment of the innovation performance of EU Member States.

You can also download a PDF version of the Rethinking the European Innovation Scoreboard: A New Methodology for 2008-2010. 

Executive Summary

The European Innovation Scoreboard (EIS) is the instrument developed at the initiative of the European Commission, under the Lisbon Strategy, to provide a comparative assessment of the innovation performance of EU Member States. The EIS provides an annual assessment of innovation performance across the EU and other leading innovative nations. The assessment is based on a wide range of indicators covering structural conditions, knowledge creation, innovation at the firm level, and outputs in terms of new products, services and intellectual property.

Since its introduction in 2000, the EIS has been both welcomed as a relevant tool for innovation benchmarking but has also been criticized for not capturing all relevant dimensions of the innovation process, for using improper indicators, for not taking into account structural differences between countries, and for its methodology of summarizing countries’ innovation performance using composite indicators.

This Methodology Report summarizes the discussion of the main criticisms of the EIS, its challenges as highlighted in the EIS 2007 report, and will present a revised list of dimensions and indicators to be used in the European Innovation Scoreboard for the 3 forthcoming EIS reports in 2008, 2009 and 2010. This revised list of dimensions and indicators has taken into account the discussions at and the written comments received after the EIS workshop on "Improving the European Innovation Scoreboard methodology" which took place in Brussels the 16th of June involving more than 40 stakeholders discussing in detail the challenges for measuring innovation performance and some of the solutions as proposed in the workshop input reports prepared by MERIT presenting a first draft of a revised list of innovation dimensions and indicators (Hollanders and van Cruysen, 2008a) and the Joint Research Centre (JRC) discussing a range a different composite indicator growth formulas measuring real progress over time (Tarantola, 2008). The workshop’s discussions on dimensions and indicators resulted in revised output report discussing an updated draft of new dimensions and indicators (Hollanders and van Cruysen, 2008b). Further work by MERIT on the feasibility of adopting these new indicators and more discussions with some of the stakeholders has resulted in the final list of indicators as presented in this report.

The new methodology will include 29 innovation indicators, grouped over 7 different innovation dimensions and 3 major groups of dimensions.

• The group of 'Enablers' captures the main drivers of innovation that are external
  to the firm and is divided into a 'Human resources' and a 'Finance and support' dimensions, capturing in total 9 indicators.
• 'Firm activities' captures innovation efforts that firms undertake recognising the
  fundamental importance of firms’ activities in the innovation process. This group covers 3 dimensions: 'Firm investments', covering a range of different investments firms make in order to generate innovations; 'Linkages & entrepreneurship', capturing the entrepreneurial efforts and the related collaboration efforts among innovating firms and also the public sector; and
  'Throughputs', capturing a.o. the Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) generated as a
  throughput in the innovation process. This group includes 11 indicators in total.
• 'Outputs' captures the outputs of firm activities and is divided in 2 dimensions
  using 9 indicators. 'Innovators' captures the success of innovation by the number of firms that have introduced innovations onto the market or within their organisations. 'Economic effects' captures the economic success of innovation in employment, exports and sales due to innovation activities.

This new methodology will be used in the forthcoming 2008 European Innovation Scoreboard, which will include more in-depth analyses of changes in innovation performance over time to identify for each country the key drivers for innovation improvements. The EIS 2008 report will also include a detailed comparison between the EU27 and the US and Japan using the results from the 2008 Global Innovation Scoreboard which will include a larger sample of non-EU countries using a more limited set of innovation indicators.

EIS 2008 Workshop

In order to view the reports and presentations of the workshop "Improving the European Innovation Scoreboard methodology" please click here