Da una recente ricerca condotta dall’Unione Europea “European Innovation scoreboard 2007: Summary of the situation in the 27 Member States” sugli indici di innovazione dei 37 paesi membri e non, l’Italia si classificherebbe al 23° posto con un indice pari allo 0,33 contro la media europea dello 0,45.

I motivi per un posizionamento così poco favorevole sono gli scarsi investimenti nella ricerca, l’invecchiamento generale della popolazione, la bassa scolarizzazione e le ridotte dimensioni delle imprese.

In fatto di innovazione sono mesi peggio di noi paesi come la Spagna, la Romania e la Croazia. Molto meglio le solite e solide Germania e Gran Bretagna che pur essendo economie “mature” conservano ancora un alto indice di innovazione.

“Italy has an overall innovation performance that places it in the group of “moderate innovators” with a performance below EU average but above the group of “catching up countries”. Other EU countries with a similar level of performance as “moderate innovators” are Estonia, Czech Republic, Slovenia, Cyprus and Spain. Italy`s overall performance has marginally increased compared with the EU average over the past 5 years.   Italy has relative strengths in the Knowledge creation and Intellectual property dimensions of innovation where it is close to the EU average. Within these dimensions it has an above average level on the indicators of share of medium-tech/ high-tech R&D, enterprises receiving public funding and Community industrial designs. The level of Italy`s performance is relatively lowest in the Innovation drivers and Innovation & entrepreneurship dimensions. The analysis suggests that Italy has a high efficiency in transforming innovation inputs into Intellectual Property outputs, but a lower efficiency in transforming such inputs into Applications outputs.”

[dm]33[/dm]