Earlier this month, PRO INNO Europe released the 2010 Innovation Union Scoreboard (IUS), a tool for assessing innovation performance. The Scoreboard relies on 25 indicators to capture the performance of national research and innovation systems and assesses the 27 Member States, as well as Croatia, Serbia, Turkey, Iceland, Norway and Switzerland. The indicators fall into one of three main categories: enablers, which are basic building blocks that allow innovation to occur, such as human resources, finance and support, and research systems; firm activities, which indicate how innovative European firms are, such as investments, linkages and entrepreneurship, and intellectual assets; and outputs, which show how the effects of firms’ innovation activities translate into benefits for the economy. The IUS segmented the countries into four groups: innovation leaders (above average performance), innovation followers (average performance), moderate innovators (below average performance) and modest innovators (significantly below average performance). The innovation leaders for 2010 were Denmark, Finland, Germany and Sweden.

Source: PRO INNO Europe