European Innovation Scoreboard 2008, which provides a comparative assesment of the innovation performance of EU member states and candidate countries, is published. The study presents the innovation performance of Turkey in comparison with EU in general, as well as with member and other candidate countries. The study is based on innovation performance across 29 indicators.
European Innovation Scoreboard 2008 classifies the countries in four groups according to the innovation performance:
• 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, Turkey, Crotia 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.
In the EIS, the development in innovation performance has been calculated for each country and for the EU27 as a block using data over a five-year period. The below table summarizes the classification of countries in innovation growth:
Turkey is a Catching-up Country
Turkey is a catching-up country in terms of innovation. Although Turkey’s innovation performance is below the EU27 average, the performance is increasing towards the EU average over time. Relative strengths, compared to the country’s average performance, are in Finance and support, Innovators and Economic effects and relative weaknesses are in Human resources, Firm investments and Throughputs
Over the past 5 years, Finance and support, Firm investments, Throughputs and Economic effects have been the main drivers of the improvement in innovation performance, in particular as a result from strong growth in Private credit (18.9%), Business R&D expenditures (17.5%), Technology Balance of Payments flows (19.8%) and Knowledge-intensive services exports (31.9%). Performance in the other dimensions has increased at a lower pace.
As being a catching up country (shown with blue colour in the below figure), Turkey performs below the average but shows a strong rate of improvement by being one of the fastest growing countries in this dimension.
Access to full report from:
http://www.proinno-europe.eu/EIS2008/website/docs/EIS_2008_Final_report.pdf
