Irish Regions Office Website

February 19, 2008

Ireland remains an 'Innovation Follower'

On February 14, the European Commission published the European Innovation Scoreboard (EIS) for 2007 which provides an assessment of innovation performance across the EU and other leading innovative nations.

The report's analysis of Ireland's innovation performance is something of a mixed bag. On the plus side, the country is adjudged to be performing strongly in terms of its public funding of innovation (despite only medium-low level R&D expenditure by both the public and private sectors), SME in-house innovation and inter-firm collaboration (despite low innovation spending and very low engagement in early-stage venture capital activity) and numbers of science & engineering graduates. Interestingly the analysis suggests an impressive efficiency in transforming innovation inputs into application outputs - particularly for hi-tech exports - although new-to-market and new-to-firm sales as well as performance in transforming such inputs into intellectual property outputs is below-par with evident relative weaknesses in patent applications and Community industrial designs being a cause for concern. Innovation prospects are also hampered by comparatively low levels of broadband penetration and life-long learning opportunities and uptake. Ireland's overall innovation performance places it in a second-tier category entitled "innovation followers" but trailing the five Member States - Denmark, Finland, Germany, Sweden and the UK - who continue to lead the way in Europe's attempts to close the innovation gap on the USA and Japan. Further details at: http://europa.eu/rapid/pressReleasesAction.do?reference=IP/08/234&format=HTML&aged=0&language=EN&guiLanguage=en

Posted by iroronan at February 19, 2008 03:23 PM