Assessment of Innovativeness of the EU Candidate Countries Based on the European Innovation Scoreboard

Abstract

Innovation is seen as a key capability for maintaining a competitive advantage, creating value for customers, and capturing a larger share of the market. In the contemporary world economy, understood as a set of mutual connections and interdependencies, innovations are crucial for economic growth and competitiveness. Internationalization and globalization processes in the world economy also concern the innovativeness of economies, and are visible in international use of technologies developed within national innovation systems, globalization of the creation and implementation of innovations, international (global) cooperation in research and development and innovation activities, international (global) protection of intellectual property. The aim of the article is to assess the level of innovativeness of the economies of selected European Union candidate countries based on the Summary Innovation Index (SII) and its components, as well as to estimate the innovation gap between these countries and the EU average of the Summary Innovation Index in 2023. The analysis was limited to Turkey (TR), Serbia (RS), Albania (AL), Montenegro ME), North Macedonia (MK), Bosnia and Herzegovina (BA) and Ukraine (UA) due to the availability of data describing the Summary Innovation Index, provided for all the EU candidate countries surveyed in the European Innovation Scoreboard. The paper formulates a research thesis assuming that the surveyed EU candidate countries are characterized by a lower level of innovativeness of economies than the EU average of the Summary Innovation Index and its components. Therefore, they show an innovation gap compared to the average for European Union countries in 2023. The results of the analysis only partially confirm this thesis. The article reviewed the literature on the innovation and innovativeness of economies and the innovation gap. The applied methods include descriptive analysis, statistical data analysis and comparative analysis along with statistical data from the European Innovation Scoreboard 2023.