Innovation: Malta slowly catching up

Although it is still considered to be far from becoming a top innovation economy, a European Commission report published yesterday says that Malta is slowly but steadily catching up.

"Malta has an overall innovation performance that places it among the group of catching-up countries," the EU innovation scoreboard says.

Other EU countries in Malta's grouping are Lithuania, Hungary, Greece, Slovakia, Poland, Portugal, Bulgaria, Latvia and Romania.

According to the Commission, Malta's innovation performance has been improving over the last five years and if the trend continues it will reach the average EU level of performance in about 20 years.

"Malta performs particularly strongly in the dimension of applications, where it is the leading EU country, and where it performs well above EU average on the indicators of exports of high-technology products, sales of new-to-market products and sales of new-to-firm products.

It performs at a relatively lower level in the dimensions of innovation drivers and knowledge creation."

The scoreboard provides an annual assessment of innovation performance across the EU and compared with other leading innovative nations.

The assessment is based on a wide range of indicators covering structural conditions, knowledge creation, innovative efforts by firms and outputs in terms of new products, services and intellectual property.

The innovation leader in the EU is Sweden, by far, followed by Denmark, Finland, Germany and the UK.

European Commission Vice President Günter Verheugen, responsible for enterprise and industry policy, said that the continued improvement in innovation performance across the EU was very encouraging and offered further evidence that the Lisbon process and the broad-based innovation strategy were working.

"However, the apparent slowdown in catching up with the US and in particular the increasing gap in public research and development show that reinforced efforts are needed if the EU is to create more world class innovation in Europe."