Malta saw the greatest improvement in its research and innovation performance, according to the European Union’s Innovation Union Scoreboard for 2015 – but it still catching up to the EU average.

Malta was followed by Latvia and Bulgaria, with Cyprus and Romania at the other end of the scoreboard.

The Innovation Union Scoreboard, which captures 25 different indicators, compares the research and innovation performance of the EU member states and the relative strengths and weaknesses of their research and innovation systems. It also covers six other countries in Europe as well as major economies round the world.

The scoreboard places member states into four different performance groups: Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Germany are ‘innovation leaders’ with innovation performance well above that of the EU average.

Austria, Belgium, France, Ireland, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Slovenia and the UK are ‘strong innovators’ with innovation performance above or close to that of the EU average;

The performance of Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Estonia, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia and Spain is below that of the EU average. These countries are classified as ‘moderate innovators’.

Bulgaria, Latvia and Romania are ‘modest innovators’ with innovation performance well below that of the EU average.

Compared to last year, innovation performance increased most rapidly in moderate and modest innovator countries, underscoring a gradual convergence of innovation performance across EU member states. Innovation performance declined for 13 member states, and improved for 15. Over the eight-year period 2007-2014, the EU average annual growth rate of innovation performance reached one per cent with most member states improving their innovation performance.

Compared with the US, Japan and South Korea, the EU is still outperformed.