The European Commission’s Research and Innovation Observatory (RIO) at the Joint Research Centre has published the second edition of the RIO country reports, which assess the evolution of national research and innovation (R&I) systems and identify key challenges.
The country reports detail the policy developments in the R&I area at national level and analyses the level of public and private funding for R&D.
The reports also assess the quality of the science base and the level of implementation of the European Research Area (ERA) priorities, describing the framework conditions for R&I and the links between industry and academia.
Covering all the EU countries, the main aim of the reports is to feed into the EU policy process by providing input to the European Semester, EU’s annual cycle of economic policy guidance and surveillance, and to monitor progress of the European Research Area, EC informed.
It is also a tool to support policy learning in the Member States by providing yearly analysis of the national R&I systems.
The most recent country reports found that industry collaboration, and commercialisation of public research results remain two of the major challenges for R&I systems in many EU countries.
Other findings show that countries ranked as innovation leaders in the Innovation Union scoreboard increasingly demand human resources in R&I activities while countries ranked as modest innovators continue efforts to build effective R&I governance and prioritise R&I spending.
The RIO Country Reports are complemented with executive summaries that put forward main challenges of the respective research and innovation systems and list the main policy changes.