It comes as no surprise that there was no one from Malta at the event organised by the European Commission in Brussels last week, the Innovation Convention, except for a lone journalist.

Maybe everybody had much to do and no one could be spared. They, and Malta with them, were the ones who missed.

There is a direct correlation between innovation and economic growth, at least insofar as incoming foreign direct investment always seeks to invest in countries that are moving ahead in the innovation scales.

Now according to a new innovation indicator launched by the European Commission last September, Malta is classed in 21st place in the innovation stakes.

The “Indicator of Innovation Output” measures the extent to which ideas from innovative sectors are able to reach the market, providing better jobs and making Europe more competitive. The indicator was developed at the request of EU leaders to benchmark national innovation policies and shows that significant differences remain between EU countries. The EU as a whole performs well in an international comparison, even though it remains behind some of the most innovative economies worldwide.

According to the Innovation Scoreboard 2013, Malta is classed among the Moderate Innovators, that is, below the EU27 (between 50% and 90% of the performance of the EU27) along with the Czech Republic, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Lithuania, Portugal, Slovakia and Spain and above the countries recognised as Modest Innovators.

Compared to the IUS 2011 only Lithuania managed to improve group membership from a Modest Innovator in the IUS 2011 to a Moderate Innovator in the IUS 2013. Poland dropped from the group of Moderate Innovators and is now a Modest Innovator.

Within the group of Moderate Innovators, the growth leader is Lithuania with a 5% growth rate, while Malta has a 3.3% growth rate, the same as Slovakia and ahead of countries like Italy (2.7%), Czech Republic (2.6%), Portugal (1.7%), Hungary (1.4%) and Spain (0.9%) while Greece, with a negative growth rate of -1.7% is the slow grower or laggard of the group.

To focus on just Malta, its growth rate from 2006 to 2010 registered at 7.7% but this decreased to 3.3% in the years 2008 to 2012, a 4.4% decrease.

And this is what the scoreboard had to say about Malta’s performance: Malta is one of the moderate innovators with a below average performance. Relative strengths are in economic affairs and weaknesses are in human resources and finance and support.

“Malta has experienced the fastest growth of all member states for most cited publications, public-private co-publications, and SMEs introducing product or process innovations. High growth is also observed in high doctorate graduates. A strong decline is observed for PCP patent applications, community designs, sales of new-to-market and new-to-firm innovations, and licence and patent revenues from abroad.

“Growth performance in open, excellent and attractive research systems is well above average and in firm investments and in economic effects well below average.”

It may be argued, with some degree of truth, that with its one-size-fits-all, the EU and its indexes does not take into consideration Malta’s size but this is true only to some extent. In today’s world markets, Malta has to swim in a very open sea and battle and compete against far bigger countries.

It is true as well that, for instance, the Innovation City competition which was awarded at the Convention to Barcelona, limited entries to cities with over 100,000 inhabitants and so excluded Malta but, again, this surely should not stop Malta from following on the example set by so many bigger cities which each have their own story of success to tell.