Innovation and Competitiveness of European Regions

The recent debate on European development policies is articulated around two major filelds of researches that are highly integrated with each other. One of this is investments in research, innovation and the innovative capacity of the European regions. Another is the degree of competitiveness of production and European regional systems. This research enters the debate on development and regional competitiveness related to innovation and research, by presenting recent data on innovation and competitiveness in the different European regions. Firstly we present the degree of innovation of European regions referring one of the main document “The Regional Innovation Scoreboard 2016”. This document provides a comparative assessment of the performance in terms of innovation in 190 regions of the EU, making use of a limited number of indicators of research and innovation. It also shows what the differences in the level of innovation performance among EU Member States are still considerable and are reduced only slowly. Secondary we present recent data on the degree of competitiveness of the regions by specifying the selected indicators of competitiveness within the EU with a base map existing (The Europe 2020 Competitiveness Report 2014). The aim of this paper is to understand the correlation between the degree of innovation and the degree of competitiveness comparing first the above mentioned dataset and mapping the most innovative and competitive regions. In the light of this comparison the differences and similarities will be highlighted, as well as the correlation between the index of innovation and to regional competitiveness. At the end are presented some policy indications on possible courses of action for innovation and competitiveness of European regions.