Summary Innovation Index

2.1. Summary Innovation Index

The Summary Innovation Index (SII) gives an “at a glance” overview of aggregate national innovation performance. Figure 1 shows the results for the 2007 SII. For Australia, Canada, Croatia, Israel, Japan, Turkey and the US the SII is an estimate based on a more limited set of indicators. The relative position of these countries in Figure 1 should thus be interpreted with care [1].

The SII is calculated using the most recent statistics from Eurostat and other internationally recognised sources as available at the time of analysis, as shown in Annex A [2].  International sources have been used wherever possible in order to improve comparability between countries [3]. It is important to note that the data relates to actual performance in years previous to 2007 as indicated in Annex B [4]. As a consequence the 2007 SII does not capture the most recent changes in innovation performances, or the impacts of policies introduced in recent years which may take some time to impact on innovation performance.

Figure 1: The 2007 Summary Innovation Index (SII)

Summary_innovation_index

Based on their SII scores the countries can be divided into the following groups [5]. This grouping also takes account of performance over a 5 year time period in order to increase robustness.

  • Sweden, Switzerland, Finland, Israel, Denmark, Japan, Germany, the UK and the US are the innovation leaders, with SII scores well above that of the EU27 and most other countries. Sweden has the highest SII of all countries, but its leading position is mostly based on strong inputs.
  • Luxembourg, Iceland, Ireland, Austria, the Netherlands, France, Belgium and Canada are the innovation followers, with SII scores below those of the innovation leaders but equal to or above that of the EU27.
  • Estonia, Australia, Norway, Czech Republic, Slovenia, Italy, Cyprus and Spain are the moderate innovators with SII scores below that of the EU27.
  • Malta, Lithuania, Hungary, Greece, Slovakia, Poland, Croatia, Portugal, Bulgaria, Latvia and Romania are the catching-up countries. Although their SII scores are significantly below the EU average, these scores are increasing towards the EU average over time with the exception of Croatia and Greece. Turkey is currently performing below the other countries included in the EIS.

[1] The Technical Annex (Methodology, section 7.2) provides more details.

[2] Data as available on 18 October 2007. More recent data which might have become available after 18 October 2007 could not be included due to the time constraint in the publication scheme of the EIS.

[3] The EU Member States, Iceland and Norway are fully covered by Eurostat. For these countries only data from international sources are used. For the other countries data from other, sometimes national, sources are also used in order to improve data availability for these countries.

[4] In the large majority of cases (almost 90%) data is from 2004, 2005 or 2006.

[5] These country groups were determined using hierarchical clustering techniques (with between-groups linkage using squared Euclidean distances as the clustering method) and SII scores for 5 years between 2003 and 2007.