Seán Sherlock, TD, Minister for Research and Innovation, welcomed the
continued improvement in Ireland’s innovation performance reported in the
European Commission’s 2014 Innovation Union Scoreboard published today
(Tuesday).
The annual Innovation Union Scoreboard provides a comparative assessment of
the research and innovation performance of the EU Member States and the
relative strengths and weaknesses of their research and innovation systems.
It helps Member States assess areas in which they need to concentrate their
efforts in order to boost their innovation performance.
The 2014 Scoreboard shows that Ireland has moved up one place from tenth to
ninth in the overall ranking of 28 EU Member States. Ireland is classified
as an ‘innovation follower’ with innovation performance above or close to
that of the EU average. The general trend of Ireland’s innovation
performance has been upward, at 110% of the EU average in 2014.
Welcoming today’s findings Minister Sherlock said he was particularly
pleased to see that Ireland is the overall leader in the indicator of the
economic effects of innovation, which captures the economic success of
innovation in employment in knowledge-intensive activities, the
contribution of medium and high-tech product exports to the trade balance,
exports of knowledge-intensive services, sales due to innovation activities
and license and patent revenues from selling technologies abroad. “This is
a very positive indication of improvement in Ireland’s competitiveness in
key areas of the economy”.
The Minister also welcomed Ireland’s performance in human resources, in
which Finland and Sweden perform best, closely followed by Ireland and the
UK. “This is a critically important indicator of growth potential as it
shows that a high share of the workforce in these countries has the skills
needed to participate in and further develop the knowledge-based economy
leading to greater job creation opportunities”.
Ireland performs well above the EU average on international scientific
co-publications and license and patent revenues from abroad. Other strong
performing indicators are population with tertiary education, employment in
knowledge intensive-services and knowledge-intensive services exports.