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  • Page | Last updated: 11 Jun 2024

R&I Monitoring frameworks

Composite Indicators
The Innova Project

The Innovation Output Indicator (IOI)

As research and innovation (R&I) performance of countries and regions cannot be gauged by a single measure, scoreboards and indices – e.g., the European Commission’s European Innovation Scoreboard and Summary Innovation Index, the Global Innovation Index by Cornell University, INSEAD, & WIPO (2023) – have widely diffused to monitor the multiple dimensions of R&I and inform policy makers and experts.

The Innovation Output Indicator (IOI) is a composite indicator published by the European Commission since 2013 to measure countries’ capacity to derive economic benefits from innovation. It tracks the extent to which innovative ideas reach the market, create knowledge-intensive jobs, and increase country technological capability. The Science, Research and Innovation Performance of the EU ( SRIP ) flagship report of DG R&I makes traditionally use of the IOI to assess technological and innovation performance of the EU.

Under INNOVA VI, an update of the IOI for 2024 has been developed and a second one is scheduled for 2025. On top of the IOI scores and rankings, these updates involve the study of green and digital indicators of innovation activity, in order to better understand innovation performance differences across EU countries and their role in the twin transitions.

Towards a regional Innovation Output Indicator

The 2025 update of the IOI will feature an extension of the IOI framework to the regional (NUTS2) level for the 27 EU Member States, with the aim to better monitor regional disparities in innovation outputs within the EU countries and contribute to the open discussion on the functioning of regional innovation systems.
 

Statistical Audit of the Commission’s European Innovation Scoreboard (EIS) and Regional innovation Scoreboard (RIS)

JRC’s Competence Centre on Composite Indicators and Scoreboards (JRC CC-COIN) has an extensive experience in conducting sensitivity and robustness analyses to evaluate the quality and comparability of indicator frameworks. Through the INNOVA VI project, the JRC CC-COIN will perform a statistical audit of the Commission’s European Innovation Scoreboard (EIS) and Regional innovation Scoreboard (RIS) .