An EU study has shown that Malta’s innovation performance is below the EU average. Of the nine indicators available for the year 2005, Malta’s innovation performance is comparable to the EU-25 average only for the group entitled applications. For the other groups (except for entrepreneurship, for which no data are available) the performance is weaker.

Although the majority of EU member states continue to lag behind the US and Japan in terms of innovation performance, the gap is closing steadily, thanks to the rapid growth in the innovative activities of a number of EU countries, such as Slovenia, Czech Republic, Lithuania, Portugal, Poland, Latvia, Greece, Cyprus, Romania and Bulgaria.

The main progress is due to the growing number of science and engineering graduates, a greater use of trademarks and designs and increased employment in medium and high-tech industries.

The ranking stems from the 2006 European Innovation Scoreboard, which aims to evaluate and compare the innovation performance of EU member states. Innovation is a key pillar of the Commission’s Lisbon Strategy for growth and jobs.

Considering the latest available data from Malta for each indicator, applications is the best performing group, with the highest levels for high-tech exports (56 per cent of exports are high-tech, 2004 data) and for sales of new-to-market products (13.6 per cent of total turnover, 2004 data).

Indicators about new to firm product sales and ICT expenditure (8.7 per cent and 8.5 per cent respectively in 2004) are also above the EU25 average.

The weakest performances are for patents and community designs, followed by business R&D expenditure and SMEs innovating in-house.

The report says the trend for the country has been positive for a number of indicators, in particular medium-high tech manufacturing R&D, organisational innovation, sales of new to market and new to firm products.

The level of science and engineering graduates and lifelong learning is still low, even if they started to improve in 2002 and 2004 respectively, and tertiary education is weaker, as it fluctuates and stopped growing after 2003.

The level of business R&D expenditure is very low, but the trend is very positive over time (from 0.07 per cent to 0.45 per cent in three years).