European Innovation Scoreboard 2018

The European Innovation Scoreboard 2018 shows improving performance and accelerating progress for Europe, and a positive outlook. However, while the Union’s innovation gap with the United States, Japan and Canada is foreseen to diminish, South Korea leads and China is catching up very fast. Europe needs to reinforce its efforts to ride the next wave of innovation and move towards cleaner and smarter industry and higher competitiveness, well-being and cohesion.

EU companies spend less on innovati…

The European Innovation Scoreboard 2018 shows improving performance and accelerating progress for Europe, and a positive outlook. However, while the Union’s innovation gap with the United States, Japan and Canada is foreseen to diminish, South Korea leads and China is catching up very fast. Europe needs to reinforce its efforts to ride the next wave of innovation and move towards cleaner and smarter industry and higher competitiveness, well-being and cohesion.

EU companies spend less on innovation. While business investments and venture capital investments increased in recent years, the EU lags behind the United States in this respect and is home to only a handful of Unicorn start-ups. Digitisation and fast-pace megatrends such as artificial intelligence and the circular economy offer huge opportunities, but also new challenges. As global competition intensifies, Europe must deepen its innovation edge to ensure success.

This is at the heart of the Commission’s Communication ‘A renewed European agenda for research and innovation - Europe’s chance to shape its
future’, which highlights that Europe needs to step up its efforts in support of the creation and scale-up of breakthrough and disruptive innovations.
A European Innovation Council will be piloted by Horizon 2020. The Internal Market and competition policies will be strengthened.