Have you met the new European strong innovator?
Tags: openinnovation, europe, portugal, europeancommission
Published: 2020-08-07 09:31:42

Companies have been through a lot of challenges during the last months: from sending their employees to remote work, to change their production in order to adapt to the current needs or even to temporarily close their doors and lay off their workers. The ordinary days of 2019 seem like a distant reality now. While we are all asking God (or karma) for better days, [European Innovation Scoreboard (EIS) of 2020](https://storage.googleapis.com/taikai-storage/others/EIS-2020-Online.pdf) was released – and even if it’s not the solution for our problems, it does bring us reasons to smile.

EIS is an annually report done by the European Commission which compares the research and innovative performance of the EU members, other European countries, and regional neighbors. The innovation performance of EU has been increasing at a steady peace since the 2012, with a performance lead over the USA (for the second time now), China, Brazil, Russia, South Africa, and India. With an indicator better than EU, only South Korea, Australia and Japan. This is the first year that the study does not include the UK as an EU member – but it had a small impact on the EU’s average innovation performance.

In order to compare the individual performance of each country – and help member states to focus their efforts on the areas they need the most, innovation performance is measured using several indicators, divided in 4 categories with several subcategories: Framework Conditions (Human Resources, Attractive Research Systems, and Innovation-friendly Environment); Investments (Finance and Support, and Firm Investments); Innovation Activities (Innovators, Linkages, and Intellectual Assets) and Impacts (Employment Impacts and Sales Impact). Considering those, member states are classified in four groups according to their average performance scores: Innovation Leaders are the group of countries with innovation performance well higher than the EU average; the second group, the Strong Innovators are the ones with innovation performance above or close to the EU average; the third group, the Moderate Innovators, covers the countries with this indicator below the EU average and finally, the Modest Innovators are the ones with innovation performance well below the EU average.

And here’s the strong innovator we want you to meet: [Portugal](https://storage.googleapis.com/taikai-storage/others/Portugal.pdf)! Previously a Moderate Innovator, this year Portugal joins Austria, Belgium, Estonia, France, Germany and Ireland. Luxembourg also changed group, from Strong Innovator, the country joins Denmark, Finland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and Sweden on Innovation Leaders.

The subcategories in which Portugal scores the best are Innovators, Innovation-friendly Environment and Attractive research systems. Within the subcategory Innovators, “Small and Medium Enterprises Innovation in-house” and “Small and Medium Enterprises with Product or Process Innovations” are the dimensions that stand up. [As facilitators of open innovation challenges](https://taikai.network/organizations), we would like to believe that our work contributed to obtain such a good result to Portugal. If your company would like to become a strong innovator as well, but you don’t know how to start, we are very happy to introduce you to the benefits of open innovation and to guide you through the organization of a challenge, which can be exclusively for your company or opened to our enthusiastic tech community! Find more information about what we do and the projects we’ve done with companies, [here](https://taikai.network/organizations). 

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