European regional innovation. A methodological and updated alternative for RIS

Abstract

Innovation has become a crucial factor for the development and
survival of the manufacturing sector of European regions. The lower
production costs in manufacturing of emerging countries force
European companies to adopt strategies of technological
specialization. Research and development are the two basic pillars
of innovation, which obtain support from two basic resources:
human capital and technology.
• The European Commission gives a special attention to the
phenomenon of regional innovation, launching different initiatives
for its evaluation, measurement and analysis. One initiative is the
European Regional Innovation Scoreboard, RIS, which provides a
support instrument for the design, formulation and evaluation of
innovation policies.
• Our research gives continuity to the process of analysis and
monitoring of regional innovation in Europe by contributing to a
methodological alternative that updates and improves the RIS
methodology, reducing considerably its arbitrariness and increasing
its transparency. More specifically, we propose the incorporation of
Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) as an objective method of
weighting the primary indicators when constructing the synthetic
index of regional innovation.
• The present work applies the proposed methodology to a set of Euregions, including statistically updated information, and then
analyzes the European regional ranking. It concludes with the main
results and findings.