Consistency between innovation indicators and national innovation performance in the case of small economies

The paper bridges two approaches to assess national innovation performance based on the European Innovation Scoreboard (EIS) composite indicators as well as on innovation indicators elaborated by us with implementing a factor analysis. The main focus of the study is on analysing the innovation performance in the case of Baltic countries – small economies, which have similar post-socialist path dependence.

The paper aims to explore what factors have been the most influential in the innovation performance of these countries, and whether these are correctly captured by the EIS indicators. We conclude that EIS methodology based assessment results are robust and, as a rule, consistent with real innovation performance of the countries.

The results of our study also show that some measuring problems may occur when elaborating composite indicators of national innovation performance, e.g. the inability to sufficiently capture the quality of human capital, small economy effect, i.e. high dependence on single enterprises of a sector, data availability issues, self-reporting problems, etc. A common problem for the Baltic States is the weak link between science and enterprises, which is also not fully captured by the EIS indicators.