National performance increased 6.4% since 2015
The European Commission has announced the results of the European Innovation Scoreboard (EIS), a European ranking, with annual publication, which aims to measure and monitor the performance of Member States in terms of innovation, demonstrating that Europe’s innovative performance has improved since 2015. Portugal is in the group of “moderately innovative” countries, having gone from 19th to 17th, among the 27 countries considered.
According to the report, Portugal surpasses the average performance of the European Union (EU) in terms of the availability of highly qualified human resources, the attractiveness of the research system, digitization and the use of information technologies. The country also has values above the EU average in indicators such as the birth of new companies, total entrepreneurial activity, net flows of foreign direct investment (as a percentage of GDP) and non-innovative ones with potential to innovate.
On the contrary, the country has a performance below 80% of the European average in the dimensions of companies’ investment in innovation, registration of intellectual property, impact of innovation on companies’ sales and environmental sustainability.
The main weaknesses of the national innovation system are air emissions by fine particles, business expenditure on innovation per person in service, productivity of resources consumed and SMEs that innovate collaboratively.
EIS in 2022 does not yet allow conclusions to be drawn on the impact of the pandemic in this regard, since they do not demonstrate a clear impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the average innovation performance, but only on individual indicators.
For Joana Mendonça, president of ANI, “this result is still a reflection of the methodological review of EIS in 2021, in which the number of indicators considered in this study went from 26 to 32. This amendment explains why Portugal fell from the ‘Strongly Innovative’ group of countries in 2020 to ‘Moderate Innovators’ in 2021. These are data that, in our view, do not represent Innovation in Portugal, but are the result of the indicators that are monitored.”.
See more information about EIS 2022 here.
