Strong showing for Belgium and Finland in first Sectoral Innovation Scoreboard
For the competitiveness of certain business sectors, such as pharmaceuticals and aerospace, it is well known that innovation plays an important role, yet there are also those where innovativeness appears less vital, for example in textiles or transport and storage. In order to identify Europe's most innovative firms within each business sector and determine what factors promote that innovativeness, a special report entitled the Sectoral Innovation Scoreboard has been produced as part of the 2004 European Innovation Scoreboard exercise. The authors of the report begin by explaining why it is important to analyse the sectoral specific levels and drivers of innovative performance. 'The answers [...] are of high value because they can help deflect an overemphasis on the activities of the 'high-tech' sectors, whose role in economic activity is often exaggerated. Modern economies are primarily dominated by the service sectors and secondarily by many low and medium technology manufacturing sectors,' they state. In order to carry out its analysis, the report had to identify 15 indicators in areas of innovative performance that would not breach national confidentiality rules. For many of Europe's business sectors, however, this was not possible, and the final Scoreboard covers ten manufacturing and four service sectors in 12 of the EU15 countries, as well as Norway. The indicators used include: share of firms innovating in house; share of SMEs (small and medium sized enterprises) cooperating with each other; innovation expenditure as a percentage of total turnover; share of firms that patent; R&D (research and development) expenditures; and EPO and USPTO patents granted. All indicators were weighted equally except for the EPO and USTPO patent indicators, which had half the weighting of the rest. Using data from the Community Innovation Survey (CIS), as well as from Eurostat and the OECD, the report identifies that the most innovative manufacturing sectors in Europe are electrical and optical equipment and chemicals and chemical products, and that the least innovative is textiles. The most innovative service sectors prove to be computer and related services, and business services. Based on a country-by-country analysis of sector innovation leaders in Europe, the report finds that Belgium, Germany and Finland are all leading in at least five manufacturing sectors, and Belgium and Finland each lead the way in three service sectors. It adds that while the 2004 summary innovation index found Greece and Italy to be among the less innovative countries in Europe, a sectoral analysis shows that both are leaders in at least one sector - Italy in non-metallic mineral products and Greece in computer-related activities. Finally, the figures reveal that either chemicals and chemical products or electrical and optical equipment appear in the top two most innovative manufacturing sectors for every country in the Scoreboard except Luxembourg. The Sectoral Innovation Scoreboard is the first step in the establishment of a Sectoral Innovation Watch, a new Sixth Framework Programme project that will analyse the innovation performance at sectoral level in order to identify barriers and opportunities for innovation within the EU.