Shaping Europe’s Future through Regional Innovation under the umbrella of the 2025 European Week of Regions and Cities.
Session co-organised by Directorate General for Research and Innovation and the Joint Research Center of the European Commission on Monday 13 October at the Library of DG-RTD.
The aim of the event was to provide a snapshot of key monitoring tools used to track regional innovation across Europe. To this end the event featured:
-The 2025 edition of the Regional Innovation Scoreboard presented by Athina Karvounaraki-DG RTD Team leader. The last volume of the Scoreboard was published on 15 July 2025 and provided a comparative assessment of the R&I performance across 241 regions in 22 EU MS and CH, NO, RS, UK. The Scoreboard helps regions assess areas in which they need to concentrate their efforts to boost their innovation performance. One of the novelties of this edition was the indicators related to cloud computing in enterprises, trade impacts and labour productivity. The Scoreboard identified 38 Innovation Leaders, 69 Strong Innovators, 74 Moderate Innovators and 60 Emerging Innovators.
-The first edition of the Regional Innovation Output Indicator 2024 presented by Panagiotis Ravanos & Michela Belo from Joint Research Center. The regional innovation output informs us of innovative ideas that reach the market and contribute towards regional competitiveness. Looking at the Regional Innovation Output with Regional Innovation Scoreboard, a link is established that high innovation output thrive due to a combination of factors having to do with high skilled workforce concentrated in the regions that attract foreign investments and the critical infrastructure of the region (innovation hubs, research centers etc.) Enhancing connectivity between regions thriving in innovation and lagging regions can help reduce the innovation disparities.
-Insights from two forthcoming studies supported by DG RTD around the feasibility of producing long regional time series data using the EIS/RIS 2023 framework presented by Hugo Hollanders, Maastricht University. The suggested methodology indicates that there is an overall convergence in innovation performance between European regions as most of the regions with a lower innovation performance in 2000 have shown a higher percentage increase between 2000-2022 in their innovation performance.
-Developing Science, Technology and Innovation (STI) indicators for comparing European cities Robert Tijssen, Leiden University. The STI indicators on Cities and metropolitan areas are pivotal in Europe’s innovation ecosystem following the concentration of talent, capital and infrastructure. The goal is to develop robust, comparable statistical data on STI performance for all major EU-27 cities because now the data is collected at regional or national level.
-Presentation of the ECIV Project on European Circular Innovation Valley. Maria Pedrosa from the regional innovation agency of Navarra illustrated how the project puts regional tools into practice. The project through a public-private partnership initiative aims to promote the adoption of the circular economy in companies in Navvare.
