Statistical Measurement of Innovation in the EU
On May 27, 2011 Giulio Perani (ISTAT, Italy), one of the leading experts in statistics of science, technology and innovation, delivered a seminar on "Statistical Measurement of Innovation in the EU"
On May 27, 2011 Giulio Perani (ISTAT, Italy), one of the leading experts in statistics of science, technology and innovation, delivered a seminar on "Statistical Measurement of Innovation in the EU".
The seminar was devoted to the role of statistics in a complex of measures of European innovation policy. Giulio Perani spoke about the system of measurement of science and innovation, used in the European Union, and analyzed the key indicators of innovation used in the European Research Area (ERA). The speaker said about the important aspects of monitoring of innovation in the EU, as well as introduced new indicators of innovation activity and “ Europe 2020” Programme, aimed at achieving sustainable economic growth.
Giulio Perani pointed out that cross-country (transnational) research projects, initiatives of small enterprises, tax policy of regions, national programmes of R&D funding and infrastructure support play an increasingly important role in the innovative development of Europe.These factors are identified as key ones. They determine policies aimed at achieving sustainable growth and serve as indicators of innovative development.
Representing Europe's development strategy until the year 2020, Giulio Perani pointed out that its main components are the measures designed to support high levels of productivity of enterprises, employment and policy coherence. This is reflected in the achievement of several targets, such as the share of spending on research and development in GDP. According to the Lisbon strategy, this figure should be equal to 3%, but only a small number of national economies can boast of compliance with this voluntary commitment, indicated in the Strategy. In addition, the speaker said, that the level of innovation development cannot be measured solely on the basis of this index, since innovations come not only from the research sector. This requires the definition of a number of additional parameters and is one of the priority tasks of the statistics. In order to solve this problem, a special research panel was formed, which proposed a number of new indicators of innovation, These indicators have been already presented in European and international publications on statistics.
At the end of the seminar there was a discussion on possible measures of innovation development.