European Commission Lists Greece as ‘Moderate Innovator’

Athens, Greece.

The European Commission released recently a list of the member states which stood out as “cutting-edge innovators” and Greece is among them.

More specifically, according to the EU Innovation Scoreboard 2023, Greece was listed together with Estonia, Slovenia, Czechia, Italy, Spain, Malta, Portugal, Lithuania, and Hungary as a “Moderate Innovator”.

“The European Innovation Scoreboard highlights the commitment of the EU and its Member States to fostering innovation rooted in excellence, competitiveness, openness, and talent. It serves as a guide for shaping policies that amplify innovation across Europe, while keeping pace with the rapidly evolving global landscape,”  the Commission said.

The scoreboard, places countries into four performance groups: Innovation Leaders  (performance is above 125% of the EU average), Strong Innovators (between 100% and 125% of the EU average), Moderate Innovators (between 70% and 100% of the EU average), and Emerging Innovators (below 70% of the EU average) based on their innovation performance.

Greece

With regard to Greece, the Commission notes that the country “is a Moderate Innovator with performance at 79.5 percent of the EU average”.

According to the scoreboard , Greece’s performance is below the average of the Moderate Innovators but is increasing at a rate higher than that of the EU (8.5%-points).

“The country’s performance gap to the EU is becoming smaller,” the Commission said.

The graph shows the evolution of innovation performance over time against the performance of the country in 2016. Innovation performance increased strongly over time between 2018 and 2022 leading to an overall improvement of 35%. In 2023 performance did almost not change.

Commenting on the evolution of innovation performance in the different innovation dimensions against the performance of Greece in 2016, the Commission said that the country’s performance increased most strongly for Finance and support and Innovators. On the other hand, performance declined Digitalisation, Information technologies and Environmental sustainability.

With regard to structural differences with the EU:

– Greece has lower per capita income but a faster growing economy. Business services takes up a larger share of the economy, with SMEs accounting for a larger share of turnover.
– Enterprise births and FDI net inflows add positively to the innovation climate, top R&D spenders add negatively.
– Greece has higher shares of In-house product innovators with and without market novelties and In-house business process innovators.
– Entrepreneurial training and government procurement are below the EU average.
– Greece shows a mixed performance on Climate change related indicators, with below average performance on the circular material use rate and environmental innovation, but a stronger reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.

EU Innovation Scoreboard 2023

Leading the way was Denmark claiming the best performance in the EU. Sweden, Finland, the Netherlands, and Belgium were also listed as Innovation Leaders.

The Top 5 most innovative regions in Europe were Hovedstaden in Denmark, followed by Helsinki-Uusimaa (Finland), Oberbayern (Germany), Stockholm (Sweden), and Berlin (Germany)

Performance of EU Member State’s innovation systems. Source: European Commission

Performing above the EU average, Strong Innovators were Austria, Germany, Luxembourg, Ireland, Cyprus, and France.

While Croatia, Slovakia, Poland, Latvia, Bulgaria and Romania were listed as Emerging Innovators.

According to the bi-yearly Regional Innovation Scoreboard, despite the recent crises, innovation performance has increased for 211 regions out of the total of 239 regions in the EU over the period since 2016.

On a global level, the EU is performing slightly better than China and closing the performance gap with Australia. At the same time, the gap with Canada, the Republic of Korea, and the United States has expanded.

Since 2001, the European Innovation Scoreboard has been the benchmark for analysing innovation performance across EU countries, European neighbours, and global competitors.