This is the eighth edition of the European Innovation Scoreboard (EIS), which provides a comparative assessment of the innovation performance of EU Member States, under the EU Lisbon Strategy. The methodology for the 2008 EIS is revised compared to that of 2007 with a stronger focus on services, non-technological aspects, and outputs of innovation (Section 5.1). The analysis of trends over time is now based on changes in the absolute values of the indicators over a five year period, rather than the previous approach of measuring trends relative to the EU average.

Finland, Ireland, Cyprus and Bulgaria are the best improving EU countries within their peer groups (Section 3)

The EIS 2008 includes innovation indicators and trend analyses for the EU27 Member States as well as for Croatia, Turkey, Iceland, Norway and Switzerland. Based on their innovation performance across 29 indicators, EU Member States fall into the following four country groups:

• Sweden, Finland, Germany, Denmark and the UK are the Innovation leaders, with innovation performance well above that of the EU average and all other countries. Of these countries, Germany is improving its performance fastest while Denmark is stagnating.
• Austria, Ireland, Luxembourg, Belgium, France and the Netherlands are the Innovation followers, with innovation performance below those of the innovation leaders but above that the EU average. Ireland's performance has been increasing fastest within this group, followed by Austria.
• Cyprus, Estonia, Slovenia, Czech Republic, Spain, Portugal, Greece and Italy are the Moderate innovators, with innovation performance below the EU average. The trend in Cyprus' innovation performance is well above the average for this group, followed by Portugal, while Spain and Italy are not improving their relative position.
• Malta, Hungary, Slovakia, Poland, Lithuania, Romania, Latvia and Bulgaria are the Catching-up countries with innovation performance well below the EU average. All of these countries have been catching up, with the exception of Lithuania.  Bulgaria and Romania have been improving their performance the fastest.

The EU is improving its performance, especially in human resources, broadband and venture capital (Section 3.4) …

The revised methodology allows a new analysis of the trends in innovation performance at EU level. This shows that the EU is making overall progress, with particularly strong increases in the numbers of graduates in science, engineering, social sciences and humanities, both at first degree and graduate level. Other areas of strong increase are in broadband and in venture capital investments, although the statistics do not yet capture the impact of the economic downturn in 2008.

… and decreasing the innovation gap with the US and Japan (Section 4) …

The 2008 EIS includes a separate analysis of the EU27 performance compared with the United States and Japan based on a set of comparable indicators. This shows that there has been a continued improvement in the EU's performance relative to the US and a recent improvement relative to Japan. Nevertheless, there remains a significant gap between the EU and these two other regions and there appears to be some slowing down in the catching up with the US in recent years.

The EU’s catching up is due to the improvements in graduate numbers, broadband and venture capital, but also to strong relative improvements in public private linkages (as measured by joint scientific publications). The remaining gap with both the US and Japan is concentrated in four areas: international patenting (as measured under the patent cooperation treaty), public private linkages and numbers of researchers (despite the improvements in both these areas), and business R&D expenditures (where both EU and US values have stagnated, while Japan's have increased).

… while holding its ground against the emerging economies (Section 5.3)

The Global Innovation Scoreboard 2008 (GIS 2008) aims at comparing the innovation performance of the EU to that of the other major R&D spenders in the world: Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Hong Kong, India, Israel, Japan, New Zealand, Republic of Korea, Mexico, Russian Federation, Singapore, South Africa and the US. The analysis shows that the EU27 block has a higher overall performance than emerging economies such as China, India and Brazil and that several EU countries are among those that have most improved their relative ranking in the period between 1995 and 2005.

New analysis confirms the importance of non-R&D innovation (Section 5.2, Section 5.4)

R&D is not the only method of innovating. Other methods include technology adoption, incremental changes, imitation, and combining existing knowledge in new ways. An analysis of firms innovating without performing R&D based on the 2007 Innobarometer survey shows that while these ‘neglected innovators’ tend to have lower innovative capabilities than R&D performing firms, the majority do invest in creative innovative activities and are just as likely to be fast growing firms. Despite this, these 'neglected innovators' are much less likely to receive public support for their innovations. 

An important part of non-R&D innovation is creativity and design. As a contribution to the 2009 European Year of Creativity and Innovation, a Design, Creativity and Innovation scoreboard was constructed using a range of novel indicators. The analysis of this scoreboard shows that countries with a good creative climate tend to have higher levels of R&D and design activities and also strong overall innovation performance. These findings point to the need to consider design and other non-R&D activities as part of the broader approach to innovation policy as well as to the strong links between creativity and innovation.