Assessing the performance of national innovation systems in Europe

To support the establishment of the European Innovation Union, the European Commission is using the Innovation Union Scoreboard (IUS). In this paper, the performance of EU28 national innovation systems are analyzed from an efficiency perspective by using exactly the same data as those provided by the IUS for years 2010-2015. This efficiency analysis was carried out using Data Envelopment Analysis. Our analysis demonstrates that the results based on efficiency measures reflect that in general terms innovation systems are widely underexploited in Europe and that there are important variances among territories. We have shown that many countries which devote fewer resources than the innovation leaders, achieve outstanding levels of efficiency and, contrary to what the IUS predicts, countries with consolidated innovation systems, do not show efficiency levels commensurate with their expected competitiveness. (Author)