Actualidad

For the first time, Lithuania improved its position in the country ranking, and was the only country to do so. Lithuania moved up from the category of ‘modest innovators’ to join the group of ‘moderate innovators’ that includes Italy, Spain, Portugal, the Czech Republic, Greece, Slovakia, Hungary and Malta.

According to the Innovation Union Scoreboard 2013, Lithuania’s strengths are in human resources, finance, and support. The Lithuanian growth indices in EU Community design and knowledge-intensive employment activities are the highest of all EU member states. Significant progress was also noted in areas such as innovation not related to research and development, Community trademarks, and license and patent revenues from abroad. In order to improve its innovation performance, the report notes that Lithuania should focus its efforts on research systems and intellectual property.

In recent years, the Lithuanian government implanted several measures to promote innovation: tax incentives for companies investing in the modernisation of technology, for research and development, and for intellectual property protection. EU structural aid measures have been channelled to research and development, innovation, improvement of the business environment, and the promotion of clustering. In addition, a support system with innovation vouchers was created to promote cooperation between education and business.

In spite of the rapid growth in innovations recorded in neighbouring countries (about 7.5% in Estonia and 4.4% in Latvia), all other countries were ranked in the same category as in the previous year.

The Innovation Union Scoreboard is prepared each year. The scoreboard provides a comparative assessment of the research and innovation performance of the EU27 member states and other countries (Croatia, Serbia, Macedonia, Turkey, Iceland, Norway and Switzerland) based on the analysis of 24 innovation-related indices. EU member states are divided into four categories: countries that show a performance well above that of the EU average are “innovation leaders”, countries that show a performance above or close to that of the EU average are “innovation followers”, countries below that of the EU average are “moderate innovators”, and countries well below that of the EU average are “modest innovators”.

Sweden leads the EU Innovation Union Scoreboard, with Germany, Denmark and Finland slightly behind.