EU narrowing innovation gap with US, Japan: study

(BRUSSELS) - The European Union is narrowing its innovation gap with the United States and Japan, although performances vary widely among the bloc's members, a study found Thursday.

"The US and Japan are still ahead of the EU-25 in terms of innovation performance, but the innovation gap between the EU-25 and Japan, and in particular with the US is decreasing," the study for the European Commission found.

The European Union counted 25 members until January when Bulgaria and Romania joined the bloc.

Denmark, Finland, Germany and Sweden won the highest marks for innovation in the latest annual scoreboard, prepared by the Maastricht Economic Research Institute on Innovation and Technology.

The study ranks developed countries capacity to innovate according to a range of factors from education to spending on information and communication technologies, investment in research and development or number of patents.

The four countries were considered to be "innovation leaders" along with Switzerland and Japan.

Austria, Belgium, Britain, France, Iceland, Ireland, Netherlands were lumped along with the United States in a second category of "innovation followers."

Bulgaria, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Greece, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Portugal, Romania and Slovenia were deemed to be "catching-up" countries while Estonia, Hungary, Italy, Malta, Slovakia and Spain considered to be "trailing countries".

EU politicians have long fretted over Europe's weak performance in generating cutting edge technology, but most members have done little to meet a target of investing the equivalent of at least three percent of gross domestic product in research and innovation by 2010.

In 2005 EU members states watered down an ambitious programme to boost the bloc's competitiveness after they consistently failed to meet the original targets when it was launched in 2000 in Lisbon with the aim to make the EU the most competitive economy in the world.

The commission said that Europe was struggling to catch up with the United States because European innovators had more difficulty winning venture capital backing and because there were fewer people who had been to university and fewer patent applications.