Portugal drops ‘significantly’ on 2021 European Innovation Scoreboard

Portugal has fallen back “significantly” on the European Commission’s European Innovation Scoreboard (EIS), which shows performance in this area across the European Union, remaining a “moderate innovator” with the ninth-lowest score among member states.

“Portugal is a Moderate Innovator,” states the EU executive in the chapter on the country in the analysis released on Monday, relating to the 2021 scoreboard. “Over time, performance relative to the EU has increased up until 2020 and decreased strongly in 2021.”

In the 2021 scoreboard, which reflects the commitment of the EU and its member states to research and innovation, the commission ranked ninth-worst, with 90 points, after six consecutive years of improvement.

“Portugal’s strengths are in Attractive research systems, Digitalisation and Use of information technologies,” the chapter reads. “The top-3 indicators include Foreign doctorate students, International scientific co-publications, and Job-to-job mobility of HRST” – human resources in science and technology.

However, according to the commission , there has been a “recent decline in innovation performance” that it attributes to “reduced performance on the indicators using innovation survey data, hiding strong performance increases on Tertiary education, Government support for business R&D, ICT specialists, Job-to-job mobility of HRST, and Environment-related technologies.”

In addition, “Portugal has below average shares of In-house business process innovators and Innovators that do not develop innovations themselves and is showing below average scores on the Climate change related indicators.”

Created in 2001, the EIS provides a comparative analysis of innovation performance in EU member states, assessing relative strengths and weaknesses of national innovation systems and aiming to help countries identify areas for improvement. The goal is to foster policy development to improve innovation in Europe and to inform policy makers in the rapidly changing global context.

Overall, the 2021 edition of the innovation scoreboard shows that innovation performance continues to improve in the EU.

“On average, innovation performance has increased by 12.5% since 2014,” the release states. “There is continued convergence within the EU, with lower-performing countries growing faster than higher-performing ones, therefore closing the innovation gap among them.”