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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, composite 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 been deployed to monitor the multiple dimensions of R&I and provide policy makers and experts with comprehensive information useful for evidence-based policymaking.

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 Commission uses the IOI to assess progress against the underlying objectives of the European R&I Framework Programmes. Also, the Science, Research and Innovation Performance of the EU ( SRIP ) flagship report of DG R&I utilises the IOI to assess technological and innovation performance of the EU.

Under INNOVA VI, two updates of the IOI in 2024 and 2025 have been developed. 

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, as well as the extension, for the first time, of the IOI to the regional level. Links to the latest 2025 update (IOI 2024) are provided below

The regional Innovation Output Indicator

R&I has a significant regional dimension, as activities, relations, and collaborations taking place at a sub-national level are increasingly being recognised as crucial facilitators of innovation within a country. 

The latest IOI report  published in 2025 includes an extension of the IOI framework to the regional (NUTS2) level for the 27 EU Member States. 

The aim of the new Regional IOI (RIOI) indicator is 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. 

The regional extension builds on the national IOI conceptual framework and features novel indicators based on granular European data on trade among regions developed using data from the European Commission’s FIGARO REG Input-Output Tables    

Download the regional IOI database
 

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-COIN) has an extensive experience in conducting sensitivity and robustness analyses to evaluate the quality and comparability of indicator frameworks. 

Over the course of more than two decades, JRC-COIN has supported the development and update of numerous indicators, including the Global Innovation Index, the European Skills Index , and the Global Talent Competitiveness Index . 

Through the INNOVA VI project, the JRC-COIN performed a statistical audit of the European Innovation Scoreboard (EIS) 2025 and Regional innovation Scoreboard (RIS) 2025. 

The results, which form part of the EIS and RIS methodological reports, confirm the robustness and reliability of both EIS and RIS as tools for ranking the performance of country and regional R&I systems.