The European Innovation Scoreboard (EIS) is a multidimensional monitoring framework providing a comparative assessment of the research and innovation performance of 40 European countries (including the EU Member States), their global partners, and the relative strengths and weaknesses of their research and innovation systems. The Framework consists of 32 indicators aggregated to a Summary Innovation Index (SII) that is used to rank and classify the assessed countries’ research and innovation systems based on their performance on the framework conditions, investments, activities, and impacts of innovation systems.
The European Commission’s Competence Centre on Composite Indicators and Scoreboards (COIN) at the Joint Research Centre (JRC) in Ispra was invited by the index developers to audit the revamped 2025 edition of the EIS. JRC-COIN aims to help ensure the transparency of the index methodology and the reliability of its results. This JRC-COIN audit focuses on data quality, the statistical soundness of the monitoring framework, and the impact of key modelling assumptions on the results.
The analysis suggests that meaningful inferences can be drawn from the European Innovation Scoreboard and its summary index. The EIS is a robust and reliable tool for ranking the performance of country research and innovation systems with a conceptual framework that is statistically coherent and well-balanced. The countries’ SII ranks are shown to be robust to changes in the data imputation, outlier treatment, normalisation, and aggregation methods, as well as indicator weights. Overall, the EIS is shown to have quite robust statistical properties. However, there always exists some room for improvement. To this end, JRC-COIN has made some suggestions towards improving the information transfer from certain transformed indicators to the summary innovation Index and monitoring the interrelations of a small set of indicators with the rest considered in the EIS framework.
RAVANOS Panagiotis;
SMALLENBROEK Oscar;
BELLO Michela;
2025-09-18
Publications Office of the European Union
JRC143130
978-92-68-31261-2 (online),
OP KI-01-25-169-EN-N (online),
https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-law-and-publications/publication-detail/-/publication/aeebb066-8df9-11f0-bfe2-01aa75ed71a1/language-en,
https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC143130,
10.2777/9950694 (online),
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