The 2009 (RIS) adopts the European Innovation Scoreboard approach at regional level and provides a richer analysis compared to previous reports due to the availability – for the first time – of more comprehensive regional Community Innovation Survey data. The analysis shows that all major EU countries have diverse levels of performance and relative strengths within their regions, and that Spain, Italy and the Czech Republic are the most heterogeneous. The report marks a significant step forward in measuring regional innovation performance although it also shows that more progress is needed on the availability and quality of innovation data at regional level.

The 2009 Regional Innovation Scoreboard and the accompanying Methodology report are available at http://www.proinno-europe.eu/metrics (see Latest publications).

Nesta has just published the pilot version of the Innovation Index, the result of 18 months of work (see Innovation Index).

It revels those key findings:

• The UK invests more heavily in innovation than R&D measures would suggest. Private sector invested 14% of privete sector output in 2007. This may be one reason why the UK has enjoyed higher productivity growth in recent years than France or Germany despite concerns over its investment in R&D.
• Most of the investment takes other forms than traditional R&D. Only 11% of the investment in innovation came from R&D.
• Innovation may be responsible for the lion’s share of the UK’s productivity growth from 1990-2007. Two-thirds of UK private sector productivity – 1.8 percentage points of productivity growth per year – between 2000 and 2007 was a result of innovation.
• Innovation is strongly linked to business growth across a range of sectors.
• The UK is relatively good place to innovate, but has some important shortcomings. The UK appears to be a mid-table performer when it comes to the wider conditions for innovation. Three are the indicators UK performs less well: access to finance, demand for innovation (goverment procurement) and skills for innovation.

The Index has three components:

1. The measure of the amount of investment in innovation in the UK economy, and the effect that this has on economic growth and productivity. Wider definition of innovation has been considered including seven categories: R&D, Design, Organisationl improvement, Training & skills development, Software development, Market research & advertising and Copyright development and mineral exploration.
2. A tool to undestand innovation at firm level that captures hidden innovation. A firm level innovation survey has been developed that tested a number of areas not included in the CIS -elements of  ‘hidden innovation’-, including sector-specificity questions.
3. A set of metric to track how favourable a nation or region is for innovation. It is intended to capture neglected framework conditions to be rooted in factors that have been demostrably linked to innovation. Seven conditions have been identified: Access to finance, Skills, Competition, Demand, Entrepreneurship, Openness and Public research.

The pilot Index provides a framework that could act as basis for better policy: it links investment directly to productivity growth and it provides new data at the level of businesses on the wider conditions of innovation. This means that tracking broader measures of innovation will encourage policymakers to appreciate better the different patterns of innovation seen across the economy, including those that do not rely heavily on R&D, and also framework areas.

G1: Restructuring industrial regions with strong weaknesses
G2: Regions with a weak economic and technological performance
G3: Regions with average economic and technological performance
G4: Advanced regions, with a certain industrial specialisation
G5: Innovative regions, with a high level of economic and technological development
G6: Capital-regions, with a certain specialisation in high value-added services
G7: Innovative capital-regions, specialised in high value-added services

In short the contributionof this paper is twofold. In the first place it provides the first RIS typology for the EU-25 regions completedusing a large number of variables. Secondly, the conclusions obtained from the analysis may be used tolead policymakers’ actions in the field of regional innovation policy in the EU.

See more at: Patterns of innovation in the EU-25 regions: a typology and policy recommendations

Although we still consider that the benchmark is an interesting initiative we could still keep, we think it could be more useful if we would create a community of people interested in sharing knowledge, statistical information and the last trends about innovation at regional level.

So we encourage all of you to join our community just following our linkedin group. Let’s see if we could be about 50 innovation professionals by the end of this year!

We hope this initiative could be of your interest.

We launched the site and the Linkedin Group in the first week of July, and the idea was to use July/August as burn-in period (these weeks are kind of half power for most of us), and in September make a campaign with our contacts in other European innovation agencies to reach twenty regions engaged, at least one in 10 different countries by the end of September.

Without starting the campaign, we have received more of half a dozen expressions of interest, so we are happy (so far, so good).

We have also identified some other interesting initiatives (besides the included in the first post) that you may be aware of, as for instance:

• http://www.statistik.baden-wuerttemberg.de/VolkswPreise/Indikatoren/IX-FE_innovatIndexLARG.asp
• http://www.internationalregions.org/

If you know any additional one, please leave us a comment with the link. It will be highly appreciated.

By first week of September, we will make a post with the list of people engaged and regions cooperating with the initiative (both in this site and in the Linkedin Group). We also look forward to having some additional and very interesting news from Hugo, who has kindly joined our project to build a community of users of  innovation benchmarking at regional level. His help will be most unvaluable.

If any of you just can’t wait to have additional information, drop us an e-mail and we will keep you informed. Also if you want your region to appear in the list we will publish in September, we will be happy to have news from you.

See you soon!

• EUROSTAT
• INNOMETRICS
• OCDE

All of them benchmark, on a yearly basis, the innovation performance of Member States, drawing on statistics from a variety of sources.

However, some of us miss updated systematic benchmarks at the regional level (NUT 2), and considering a broader definition of innovation (not only Science & Technology or Competitiveness oriented, but also Eco-innovation and Social Innovation, for instance).

The last report that we have found with this orientation is “Regional Innovation Scoreboard 2006 RIS ” produced by Innometrics with statistical information from years 2003-2005. Unfortunately, this report has not been followed by any other (as has been the case of “European Innovation Scoreboard“, that has had yearly issues from 2001 to 2008 -  and is foreseen to have al least up to 2010)

So we would like to create a community of people interested in sharing information from their regions, and their views on how Innovation should be measured at the regional level. Our goal will be to produce, on a yearly basis, a Regional Innovation Scoreboard 2.0., with the cooperation and direct involvement of persons from at least 50 regions (NUT 2) in Europe.

First report will be produced in February 2010.

Rules of engagement:

• We believe that innovation happens also (and probably mainly) at regional level. Country innovation systems are OK, but regional innovation systems should be taken into account.
• This is not an “official” initiative, nor is supported by any public administration.
• This is “user-oriented”: we do not want to compete with sources cited above, but to cooperate with them. We will be happy if they produce in the future “Regional Innovation Scoreboards”, and we will cooperate with any initiative in this direction.
• Our goal is to share benchmark information from different sources, not to produce our own indicators, nor engage in theoretical debates on statistics, innovation, indicators or any combination of them.
• The report will be produced in a cooperative way, using Wiki or similar tools.
• We will not look for private or public funding. We want this iniatitive to keep simple and free: people sharing information under a Creative Commons license (we will discuss later on which one).
• We are not naive nor inexperienced. We are aware of the conceptual, statistical and practical issues involved in such a benchmarking exercise, and also of the challenges of cooperative work (See Forrester on Innobasque and Social Networks): we just think impossible is nothing.
• And yes, we are aware of all the consortia and networks working under different European Commission schemes in these issues (as the IRE Network), and no, we haven’t got the Ring tu rule them all. As we have said this is a Web 2.0. kind of thing.

¿How do we start? We have created a Linkedin Group and this WordPress Blog. Both initiatives will work together, and feed each other. If needed we will evolve into more complete tools – Ning or something.

Our target is simple: Create a community by the end of 2009 with people from at least 50 European regions, and produce our first report by February 2010.

If you are interested, please send us an e-mail or join our Linkedin group. Typically your work will be related to promotion of innovation at a regional level (from public or private agencies, universities, research institutions,  etc…), but we are open to other profiles.

By first week of september we will produce and distribute our first Workprogramme (suggestions are welcome).

Welcome aboard!