Italy

The EIS country pages provide for each of the European countries covered by the EIS 2007 a performance chart showing performance by indicator relative to the EU mean, a radar graph showing the innovation performance for each of the innovation dimensions relative to the country’s SII performance and the data tables showing, where available, time series data for the SII, the dimensions and each of the indicators.

More information is available on each country is available in the EIS report and its thematic papers which are available on the INNO Metrics website). The EIS 2007 thematic papers provide information on services innovation, the impact of differences in socio-economic conditions on innovation performance, innovation efficiency and non-R&D based innovation.

Italy has an overall innovation performance that places it in the group of “moderate innovators” with a performance below EU average but above the group of “catching up countries”. Other EU countries with a similar level of performance as “moderate innovators” are Estonia, Czech Republic, Slovenia, Cyprus and Spain. Italy’s overall performance has marginally increased compared with the EU average over the past 5 years.

Italy has relative strengths in the Knowledge creation and Intellectual property dimensions of innovation where it is close to the EU average. Within these dimensions it has an above average level on the indicators of share of medium-tech/ high-tech R&D, enterprises receiving public funding and Community industrial designs. The level of Italy’s performance is lowest in the Innovation drivers and Innovation & entrepreneurship dimensions. The analysis suggests that Italy has a high efficiency in transforming innovation inputs into Intellectual Property outputs, but a lower efficiency in transforming such inputs into Applications outputs.