Switzerland is again the most innovative country according to the European Innovation Scoreboard published this week by the European Commission. Switzerland performs better than the EU countries and all other countries analysed in the survey including USA, South Korea and Israel.
Since 2001, the European Innovation Scoreboard provides a comparative analysis of innovation performance in EU countries, other European countries, regional neighbours and highly innovative countries around the world. It assesses relative strengths and weaknesses in national innovation performance and helps countries identify areas they need to address.
Switzerland is the best performing country in the comparison with performance at 142.4% of the EU average. Since 2015 the performance has increased by 4.0% points at a rate lower than that of the EU (9.9%-points). The country’s performance lead over the EU is becoming smaller.
Poor performance regarding venture capital
Compared to the previous year, it is striking that Switzerland scores significantly poorer on the criterion of venture capital expenditures (-10.6% points). This is not due to a decline in VC investments, but rather caused by the fact that in 2021 investments in many other European countries increased even stronger than in Switzerland.
In comparison with Sweden, the top performer in the EU, the weakness in digitalisation is also striking. Sweden scores significantly higher than Switzerland in the areas of digitisation and use of information technologies.
The current report shows additional traditional weaknesses. For example, Swiss SMEs collaborate too little with each other. In addition, there are relatively few knowledge-intensive service exports. And compared to 2015 there are fewer SMEs with product innovations and therefore fewer exports of innovative products and fewer employees in innovative companies.
The five-year comparison clearly shows the narrowing gap between Switzerland and other highly innovative countries. The scoreboard identifies five top EU member states. Their performance has improved significantly stronger than Switzerland's over the past five years. While Switzerland gained 4 percentage points, Sweden gained 10.5%, Finland 19.5%, Denmark 11.3%, the Netherlands 9.9% and Belgium 16.8%.
Almost all EU countries have improved their innovation performance over the period 2015-2022. Compared to the EU in 2015 performance has increased most in Cyprus, Estonia, Greece, Lithuania, and Czechia.
(Stefan Kyora)
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