The European Innovation Scoreboard: drowning by numbers?

For quite some time, European countries have felt the need to compare their respective performances through the application of benchmarking and scoreboard tools, the findings of which are typically processed into country rankings, which in turn guarantee considerable publicity in the media and the interested public. Within the scope of such activities, the European Innovation Scoreboard (EIS) has established itself as probably the most widely watched benchmarking tool in the discussion of European technology policy. In this paper we consider its current status and discuss some of the strengths and weaknesses of the EIS indicators. We show that there is a process of convergence in innovation performance in Europe but that the possibilities of short-term influences by policy on the variables measured by the EIS are limited. Given the quality and availability of the data, we argue that the publishing cycle should be extended to two years.