Estonia Leads RIS Countries in Innovation according to the newest European Innovation Scoreboard

According to the 2024 edition of the European Innovation Scoreboard (EIS), the European Union’s innovation performance continues to improve at a steady pace, reaching a 10% increase since 2017 and a growth of 0.5% between 2023 and 2024. However, the increase is not stable across the EU countries and varies strongly from one to another. We examined more closely how the regions from the EIT Regional Innovation Scheme are progressing in their innovation.

Innovation Performance

Among RIS regions, only one country, Estonia, was considered a strong innovator with a 27%-point increase in innovation score since 2017. The rest of the countries were considered moderate or emerging innovators highlighting the need for RIS countries to catch up with the rest of EU member states. Greece and Czechia significantly improved their performance gaining 16%-points, with small consequent improvements in the ranking. Conversely, the extent of the increase in innovation scores was relatively low in Romania, Slovakia, Latvia, Portugal, and Slovenia, displaying less than a 5%-point increase over the period of eight years.

Attractive Research Systems

When it comes to healthcare, the research environment is the basis for developing innovative technologies and ecosystems. Among the RIS countries, Estonia, Portugal, and Slovenia scored above the EU average in the attractive research systems category. In addition, Hungary and Lithuania showed significant improvement of 47% points and 41% points, respectively, since 2017.

Digitalisation

As the healthcare industry shifts towards digitalization, broadband penetration and digital skills need advancement. Within the RIS region, Portugal was the only country that scored above the EU average, ranking 7th above Luxembourg. Other countries, such as Estonia and Czechia, demonstrated strong growth in these dimensions, with 67%-point increases and 42%-point increases correspondingly.

Finance and Support

We need adequate finance and support to innovate the healthcare system. Apart from Estonia, all RIS countries fell below the EU average for this category. Despite the ranking, Croatia, Portugal, and Lithuania showed a significant improvement in this indicator, with Croatia demonstrating an increase of 43% points.

Innovators

Another dimension of innovation is how SMEs are bringing new ideas to life through product and business process innovation. This category had a significant number of countries that performed above the EU average, five in total: Italy, Croatia, Slovenia, Estonia, and Portugal.

Environmental sustainability

The final category we wanted to highlight is environmental sustainability, one of the indicators of which was the development of environment-related technologies. Italy was the best performer for this dimension among the RIS countries, making it in the top five countries and performing 20% above the 2017 EU average.

To summarise, RIS countries show a significant increase in scores in various innovation categories related to healthcare, including innovators, digitalisation, and research systems. Estonia is the leader in the RIS region for innovation, ranking high in research systems, digitalisation, finance and support, and innovator categories. Despite the lack of an increase in innovation performance, Portugal scored above the EU average in three categories and showed a significant improvement in finance and support activities for innovation. Croatia and Lithuania showed significant progress in finance and support, innovator and digitalisation.