Country improving in terms of innovation
Greece’s record in innovation showed an improvement from 2010 to 2018. Although the country considerably lags the European average, it appears that the innovation gap between Greece and the European Union has been reduced over the last nine years.
The latest review by the European Commission, “European Innovation Scoreboard (EIS) 2019,” gives Greece an innovation score of 81.6 points, putting the country in 20th place among the 28 EU member-states. That means Greece is in the EU’s third division in terms of innovation, among other countries that scored between 60 and 100 points – i.e. a medium-level performance, as countries with a strong innovation index score over 100 points.
Greece has considerably improved its stature in the last decade, when certain subindexes showed a significant improvement, such as spending on research and development. The National Documentation Center of Greece has particularly increased R&D expenditure in the private sector, with R&D spending in Greece rising marginally above 1 percent of gross domestic product in 2018, against a European average rate of over 2 percent of GDP, but this is a marked improvement from 0.6 percent at the start of the decade.
