Innovativeness of the European economies in the context of the modified European Innovation Scoreboard
Innovativeness of the European economies in the context of the modified European Innovation Scoreboard

Summary/Abstract: Research background: Innovation is an important determinant of economic development, andits importance is growing with the advancement of digitization and the development of theFourth Industrial Revolution. In turn, the assessment of the innovativeness of a country’seconomy affects its investment attractiveness and international image.Purpose of this study: Given the factors presented above, the main aim of this study is toexplore and compare the innovativeness of European economies in the context of the modifiedEuropean Innovation Scoreboard. Methods: To achieve this goal, the authors propose two key modifications of the existinginnovation assessment methodology contained in the European Innovation Scoreboard. Thefirst concerns the principles of the normalization of assessment indicators and aims to elimi-nate extreme assessment values. The second proposes to remove the indicators which aredifficult to measure, subjective, and not always useful: (1) those related to sustainable devel-opment (resource productivity; emissions of fine particulates; and environment-related tech-nologies) and (2) those that take into account only small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEsintroducing product innovations; SMEs introducing business process innovations; and inno-vative SMEs collaborating with others).Findings & value added: An alternative approach to assessing the innovativeness of theanalyzed countries — as proposed by the authors — resulted in changes in the ranking ofcountries in relation to the European Innovation Scoreboard, but the changes were not signifi-cant. The major changes concerned Serbia (down four places), Belgium (down two places),Hungary (up three places), and Poland (up two places). In addition, five countries moved upone place in the ranking (the UK, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Estonia, Slovenia, Spain, andSlovakia), and five lost one place in the ranking (Norway, Italy, Portugal, Greece, and Croa-tia). Thirteen countries had no changes. The obtained results allowed us to conclude that thecountries with the best and the worst innovativeness maintained the assessment level regard-less of changes in the methodology of its implementation. The objectification of rules had thestrongest impact on the countries in the middle of the ranking. This study draws attention tothe problem of the subjectivity of the innovation rankings. It has also been documented thatmodifying the selection of evaluation criteria may change the final position in the ranking,which, in the case of emerging and developing economies, may affect investor assessment andeconomic growth opportunities. Such considerations are important because they are outsidethe often uncritical mainstream approach to the assessment of the innovativeness of econo-mies. The conclusions imply the need for a multisource analysis of innovation and a criticallook at the proposed methodologies.

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