Updated European Service Innovation Scoreboard published - the Economic Crisis reflects Regional Performance
The first edition of European Service Innovation Scoreboard (ESIS) covering the EU27 countries and their regions was published in June 2014. The 2014 ESIS already provided a comprehensive overview of the impact of service innovation at national and regional level across the EU and presented three scorecards each serving a different purpose. The 2015 update of ESIS maintains the same measurement framework but uses more recent data and covers more regions and countries. In this updated version, published in January 2015, almost all the indicators have been complemented with more recent data. Country coverage has been improved by adding Croatia, Iceland, Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Norway, Serbia, Switzerland and Turkey in addition to the EU27 countries covered already by the first 2014 pilot ESIS edition.
The 2015 ESIS update indicates several variations in performance as compared to the first edition. There are no countries which excel in all the different dimensions, but several of the most innovative countries, as identified in the Innovation Union Scoreboard (IUS) such as Denmark and Finland are among the best performing countries in several dimensions. In direct comparison to the IUSs least innovative countries of Bulgaria, Latvia and Romania are also the worst three countries in terms of service innovation performance in at least half of the dimensions.
Compared to the pilot edition, performances reflected in the 2015 ESIS update are now worse for many regions in relation to the scorecard that highlights the importance of the transformative power of service innovation. For example, in those indicators that measure the Wider framework conditions, performance levels are lower in the majority of regions. The performance in Outputs of service innovation is also disappointing for the majority of regions in that the share of turnover due to newly introduced product innovations is less. However, the percentage of people employed in service innovation intensive industries has increased in almost 60% of the regions.
For almost half of the indicators, data from the Community Innovation Survey (CIS) has been used and in most of these cases, the performance levels have decreased. The 2014 pilot ESIS used data from the CIS that covered firms innovation activities in 2008 to 2010, whereas the 2015 ESIS update uses data covering innovation activities during 2010 to 2012. Thus, it seems that the decline in performance is at least partly due to the economic crisis.
The initial effect of the crisis in 2008 -2010 was on firms economic activities but production can be more easily adapted in response to a decline in sales. However, faced with a continuing decline in sales and a consequent reduction in profits, the secondary effect of the crisis was that firms postponed or even cancelled innovation activities because of a lack of funding, which could have had a negative effect on the firm's competitiveness and employment. An analysis of the possible links between ESIS and the changes in socio-economic performance shows that improved performance in service innovation has a positive impact on socio-economic performance as measured by changes in per capita GDP and reductions in the percentage of long-term unemployment.
