The European Innovation Scoreboard provides a comparative analysis of innovation performance in EU countries, other European countries, and regional neighbours. It assesses relative strengths and weaknesses of national innovation systems and helps countries identify areas they need to address. Greece’s results in the report are cause for optimism, especially with regard to small and medium-sized businesses.
The 2018 edition of the European Innovation Scoreboard, released on June 22, 2018, highlights that the EU’s innovation performance continues to improve, that progress is accelerating, and that the outlook is positive. Since 2010, the EU’s average innovation performance has increased by 5.8 percentage points, and it is expected to improve by an additional 6 percentage points over the next 2 years. The EU continues to improve its position relative to the United States, Japan, and Canada. However, China is catching up at three times the EU’s innovation performance growth rate.
Within the EU, innovation performance increased in 18 countries and decreased in 10 countries since 2010. Sweden remains the EU innovation leader, followed by Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands, the UK, and Luxembourg. Lithuania, the Netherlands, Malta, the UK, Latvia, and France are the fastest growing innovators.
Greece’s Innovation performance
According to the data, Greece is a moderate innovator, which means that, over time, performance has remained the same relative to that of EU in 2010, in spite of the extensive financial challenges faced by both the country’s public and private sectors. Innovators, Linkages and Attractive research systems are the country’s strongest innovation dimensions: This applies predominantly to Greek small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) with product or process innovations, SMEs with marketing or organizational innovations, SMEs innovating in-house and innovative SMEs collaborating with others; on these key indicators, Greece vastly outperforms the EU average. Greece also outperforms the EU average regarding the percentage of population with tertiary education.
Provisional Customs Information System 2016 data shows improved performance for all six indicators
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