Europe is closing its innovation gap with the United States and Japan but differences in performance between EU Member States are still high and diminishing only slowly, according to the European Commission's Innovation Union Scoreboard 2014 and the Regional Innovation Scoreboard 2014. The relevant report says that Cyprus is an innovation follower. Innovation performance in Cyprus increased strongly until 2008 and since then it has remained relatively stable, except for a small set back in 2009. The performance relative to the EU has been improving over time from 81% in 2007 to just above 90% in 2013. Cyprus also moved from being a moderate innovator in 2006 and 2007 to being an innovation follower from 2008 onwards.

Cyprus performs well above the EU average for international scientific co-publications, Non-R&D innovation expenditures, Community trademarks and Innovative SMEs collaborating with others. Performance well below the average is observed in Non-EU doctorate students, License and patent revenues from abroad and New doctorate graduates. High growth is observed for Community designs, sales share of new innovations, international scientific co-publications and community trademarks. Large declines in growth are observed in License and patent revenues from abroad, Non-EU doctorate students and PCT patent applications.

The Innovation Union Scoreboard 2014 places Member States into four different performance groups: Denmark (DK), Finland (FI), Germany (DE) and Sweden (SE) are 'Innovation Leaders' with innovation performance well above that of the EU average. Austria (AT), Belgium (BE), Cyprus (CY), Estonia (EE), France (FR), Ireland (IE), Luxembourg (LU), Netherlands (NL), Slovenia (SI) and the United Kingdom (UK) are 'Innovation followers' with innovation performance above or close to that of the EU average. The performance of Croatia (HR), Czech Republic (CZ), Greece (EL), Hungary (HU), Italy (IT), Lithuania (LT), Malta (MT), Poland (PL), Portugal (PT), Slovakia (SK) and Spain (ES) is below that of the EU average. These countries are ‘Moderate innovators’. Bulgaria (BG), Latvia (LV) and Romania (RO) are 'Modest innovators' with innovation performance well below that of the EU average.

Source: Financial Mirror