Romania is listed in the Modest Innovators category of the EU 2018 Innovation Scoreboard, similar to the 2017 edition of the report. The country shares the category with Bulgaria and ranks last in the EU on its innovation performance.

The annual European Innovation Scoreboard (EIS) offers a comparative assessment of the research and innovation performance of the EU member states and selected third countries. It analyses the relative strengths and weaknesses of national research and innovation systems. The EIS assesses countries on four main types of indicators and ten innovation dimensions, capturing in total 27 different indicators, among them human resources, attractive research systems, innovation-friendly environment or investments.

The Modest Innovators category includes countries with a performance level below 50% of the EU average. Romania’s performance has been decreasing since 2010 by 14%. Alongside Cyprus, with performance declining by 9%, Romania is among the two members states with a performance that declined by more than 5 percentage points.

‘Innovation-friendly environment’ and ‘sales impacts’ are the strongest innovation dimensions in the case of Romania, while ‘innovators’ and ‘firm investments’ the weakest, the report found.

The 'innovation-friendly environment' dimension covers broadband penetration and opportunity-driven entrepreneurship. The 'sales impacts' dimension covers medium and high tech product exports, knowledge-intensive services exports, and sales of new-to-market and new-to-firm product innovation.

The ‘innovators’ dimension refers to SMEs with product or process innovations, SMEs with marketing or organizational innovations, and SMEs innovating in-house. ‘Firm investments’ covers the R&D expenditure in the business sector, non-R&D innovation expenditures, and enterprises providing training to develop or upgrade ICT skills of their personnel.

Sweden came out again at the top as the EU innovation leader in this year's scoreboard, followed by Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and Luxembourg which joined the top innovators group this year. Germany dropped to the group of strong innovators.

On average, the innovation performance of the EU has increased by 5.8% since 2010. Performance has increased most in Lithuania, Malta, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom.

The 2018 European Innovation Scoreboard is available here.

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editor@romania-insider.com