National performance went up 6.4% since 2015

The European Commission has announced the results of the European Innovation Scoreboard (EIS), a European ranking, published annually, which aims to measure and monitor Member States' innovation performance, showing that Europe's innovation performance has improved since 2015. Portugal is in the group of 'moderately innovative' countries, having moved from 19^th position to 17^th among the 27 countries considered.

According to the report, Portugal exceeds the European Union (EU) average performance regarding the availability of highly qualified human resources, the attractiveness of the research system, digitalisation and the use of information technologies. The country also scores above EU average on indicators such as new business start-ups, total entrepreneurial activity, net foreign direct investment flows (as a percentage of GDP) and non-innovators with the potential to innovate.

On the contrary, the country performs below 80% of European average in the dimensions of business investment in innovation, intellectual property registration, innovation impact on company sales and environmental sustainability.

The main weaknesses of the national innovation system are air pollution with fine particles, business expenditure on innovation per person employed, productivity of resources consumed and SMEs innovating collaboratively.

The EIS in 2022 does not yet allow conclusions to be drawn on the impact of the pandemic in this regard, as they do not demonstrate a clear impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on average innovation performance, but only on individual indicators.

For Joana Mendonça, President of ANI, 'this result also reflects the methodological revision of the EIS in 2021, in which the number of indicators considered in this study rose from 26 to 32. This change explains why Portugal dropped from the 'Strong Innovators' group of countries in 2020 to 'Moderate Innovators' in 2021. These are data that, in our understanding, do not represent Innovation in Portugal, but are the result of the monitored indicators'.

See more information about the EIS 2022 here.