Ireland has topped the rankings for innovation among small and medium sized businesses, according to a new European Commission scoreboard published today.

Irish SMEs were ranked the best in the EU for innovation because of their strong record of in-house innovation, the fast growth of jobs in the Irish innovation sector and the high growth in knowledge intensive industries.

The scoreboard covered the EU Member States as well as Iceland, Israel, Macedonia, Norway, Serbia, Switzerland, Turkey, and Ukraine, with Irish SMEs leading the board.

The Commission said: “Ireland is the leader for innovation in small and medium-sized companies - followed by Germany, Luxembourg, France, and Austria. These countries are characterised by high shares of SMEs involved in innovation activities: they introduce more innovative products and generate more new jobs in fast-growing young companies.”

With regard to companies that invest a lot in innovation, Germany was ranked the overall leader, followed by Estonia, Austria and Finland. The scoreboard found companies in these countries invest more in innovation activities, both for science-based R&D activities and non-R&D innovation activities, including investments in advanced equipment and machinery.

Other findings are that EU innovation is catching up with Japan and the US, Sweden is once again the innovation leader, and Latvia has become the fastest growing innovator.

Sweden leads in the human resources area of innovation, followed by Slovenia, Ireland, the United Kingdom, Finland and Latvia. Sweden also topped the rankings for innovation in academia, followed by the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg and Denmark. These countries are open for cooperation with partners from abroad, researchers are well networked at international level, and the quality of research output is very high.