The level of innovation in regions varies considerably across almost all EU countries. This is one of the main findings of the 2009 Regional Innovation Scoreboard (RIS), published on 14 December 2009 by the Institute for the Protection and Security of the Citizen (IPSC), one of the seven institutes of the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC) together with the Commission’s Directorate-General for Enterprise and Industry and the Maastricht University (MERIT).
This 2009 RIS provides a comparative assessment of innovation performance across the 201 regions of the European Union and Norway in order to inform policy priorities and to monitor trends. With respect to the previous report published in 2006, which used a very limited set of regional indicators, this report offers richer information to regional innovation policy-makers of more comprehensive and detailed, regional Community Innovation Survey (CIS) indicators. Despite this progress, the data available at regional level remains considerably less than at national level, and in particular four Member States – Germany, Sweden, Ireland and the Netherlands – were not able to provide regional CIS data. Due to these limitations, the 2009 RIS does not provide an absolute ranking of individual regions, but ranks groups of regions at broadly similar levels of performance.
The report also shows that there is considerable diversity in regional innovation performances. Thus all countries have regions at different levels of performance. This emphasizes the need for policies to reflect regional contexts and for better data to assess regional innovation performances. The most heterogeneous countries are Spain, Italy and Czech Republic where innovation performance varies from low to medium-high.
It is stressed that the most innovative regions are typically in the most innovative countries. Nearly all the “high innovators” regions are in the group of “Innovation Leaders” identified in the European Innovation Scoreboard (EIS). Similarly all of the “low innovators” regions are located in countries that have below average performance in the EIS. However, the results also show regions that outperform their country level. Regional performance appears relatively stable since 2004. The pattern of innovation is quite stable between year 2004 and 2006, with only a few changes in group membership. More specifically, most of the changes are positive and relate to Cataluña, Comunidad Valenciana, Illes Balears, and Ceuta (Spain), Bassin Parisien, Est and Sud-Ouest (France), Unterfranken (Germany), Közép-Dunántúl (Hungary), Algarve (Portugal), and Hedmark og Oppland (Norway). Longer time series data would be needed to analyse the dynamics of regional innovation performance and how this might relate to other factors such as changes in GDP, industrial structure and public policies.