United Kingdom

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.

The UK’s overall level of innovation performance places it among the “innovation leaders”. Other EU countries within this group with a comparable overall performance are Sweden, Finland, Denmark and Germany. The trend in the UK’s innovation performance over recent years has been about the same as the EU average growth rate.

Regarding the five dimensions of innovation performance, the UK performs particularly strongly in Innovation & entrepreneurship with a relatively high level on the indicator of Early-stage venture capital. It performs below the EU average in the dimension of Intellectual property with a relatively low level on the indicators of Triad patents and Community designs. The analysis of innovation efficiency suggests that the UK is above the EU average in transforming innovation inputs into Applications, but below average in transforming such inputs into Intellectual property outputs.