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.Peer reviewe