Having notched up eighth place on the European Innovation Scoreboard, Austria has once again been recognised by the European Union as a ‘strong innovator’.
Austria’s corporate landscape features a high density of pioneering firms, with SMEs in particular managing to achieve a noticeable expansion of their innovative undertakings over the last few years. Austria’s creative abilities have secured a great number of jobs, along with the country’s prosperity, so the aim is to achieve further increases in this performance.
Austria was able to improve on last year’s position in the EU Commission’s innovations rankings (European Innovation Scoreboard, EIS ), climbing to eighth place in 2020 and placing the country among the ranks of EU member states’ strong innovators. Sweden topped the table, followed by Finland and Denmark.
The EIS identifies Austria’s strong suits as its linkages and collaboration in the fields of research, technology and innovation, including joint publications between the public and private sector, co-authored international scientific publications, cooperation among innovative KMUs, and the number of foreign doctoral students.
The report acknowledges Austrian SMEs’ powerful innovation, emphasising the private sector’s expenditure on research and development (R&D) and its strengths in filing patents to protect intellectual property. The EIS’s most recent estimate of total Austrian outgoings in the field of R&D is 3.17% of gross domestic product (GDP).
The European Innovation Scoreboard is published annually and uses 27 criteria to compare the innovation power of EU member states. While the rankings indicate that, as a whole, the EU countries outstrip the USA as far as their innovative performance is concerned, the EU Commission has stated that more must be done to catch up with global innovation leaders such as South Korea, Australia and Japan.
Source: Austrian Trade Commission