State of the art of health research and innovation (R&I) in EU regions

The report aims to provide a comprehensive overview of Health Research and Innovation (R&I) in European countries and regions. With the use of different well-established data sources (e.g. Eurostat and WHO), new data provided by the European Commission focusing on Health thematic priority, but also data on clinical trials and educational infrastructure elaborated for the first time at NUTS2 level by University of Trieste, the report analyzes through different statistical techniques the current status of Health R&I in EU regions. The report also analyses the possible causes and influencing factors of national and regional disparities in Health R&I, with a specific focus on less performing EU regions. The report provides an ‘operationalization’ of the framework developed jointly with project partners. It also includes a first attempt to build a composite indicator at country level for research excellence in Health. From the report it emerges that the divide between countries and regions is different in terms of publications output with respect to patenting output and that the country success in FP7, with few exceptions, seems to be quite in line with the country research performances. When analyzing the possible factors influencing Health R&I it results that R&D investment and human resources may have an important role in explaining different countries performances although some of these countries seem to use resources more efficiently than others. The report highlights also some problems related to the lack of specific and homogenous data on Health for all countries/regions as well as problems in the use of some specific indicators for Health such as the composite indicator for measuring research excellence.