Innovative Greece - What's the actual level of innovation in the country?
by The Greek Analyst | Originally published on The Greek Analyst.
Guest post by The Greek Analyst | Originally published on The Greek Analyst.
💡 Innovative Greece
If you walked or drove around Athens over the summer, you certainly bumped into the super cool posters by Endeavor Greece with the tagline: #innovation_nation.
I personally loved the campaign. It also got me thinking…
Lately, we talk a lot about innovation in Greece.
From cutting-edge research centers and network groups to inspiring podcast series and trailblazing lectures, the concept of innovation has become a key part of the Greek zeitgeist.
That’s quite impressive for a long-time laggard in all things science and tech.
But how innovative is Greece after all?
I decided to look at the data. The result?
While we still have a long way to go, Greece is doing better than people might think.
Let’s dive in together.
European Innovation Scoreboard
The European Innovation Scoreboard (EIS) offers a good start. The EIS is an annual publication providing comparative assessment of the research and innovation performance of EU Member States and other countries.
Performance is measured across countries by the Summary Innovation Index (SII).
According to the EIS, Greece is a moderate innovator.
While Greece’s index score dropped slightly from 2024 to 2023, the country has been making consistent gains since 2019, narrowing the gap with the EU average.
In fact, Greece’s innovation performance has improved by more than 35% since 2016.
Regional Innovation Scoreboard
Let’s now turn to the Regional Innovation Scoreboard (RIS), the benchmark used to assess the innovation performance of different regions within European countries.
While the EIS gives a macro level snapshot of a country’s innovation, the RIS helps provide a micro level overview.
Here is the RIS map of Europe for 2023.
At a very high level, Greece looks very much on par with other countries in South Europe (Portugal, Italy and parts of Spain), while doing better than most of Eastern European countries. The gap is still large with Central and Northern Europe.
Let’s now look specifically at Greece’s different regions.
Three things immediately stand out:
Innovation performance has increased for all regions and at a higher rate than that of the EU (8.5%). Clearly, Greece is doing something right.
Attiki is by and far the most innovative region in Greece, followed by Crete and Kentriki (Central) Macedonia. That’s not a coincidence, given the concentration of universities and companies in Athens, Rethymno/Chania and Thessaloniki.
Former laggards like Ipeiros and Peloponnisos are showing remarkable growth, thanks to new clusters of innovation developing in Ioannina and Kalamata.
Global Innovation Index
The Global Innovation Index (GII) ranks countries around the world according to their innovation capabilities.
Consisting of almost 80 indicators, the GII is perhaps the single best metric in the world to understand the comparative level of innovation across countries.
So how does Greece fare?
Greece ranks 42nd across 132 countries in the world in terms of innovation.
The country’s ranking has improved a lot since its early crisis era. Hovering at or slightly above the rank of 40 for the past 10 years, the trend shows a consistent hold that could be improved further.
Greece’s innovation performance is at expectations for its level of development.
There is certainly much more that we can do to perform above expectations.
Luckily, Greece currently produces more innovation than it invests for it.
Innovation Output Indicator
Outcomes (outputs) of innovation investments (inputs) are clearly important.
The Innovation Output Indicator (IOI) offers an output-oriented measure of innovation performance that helps judge a country’s capacity to bring innovations to market, create knowledge-intensive jobs and increase its overall tech capabilities.
Greece’s IOI score has increased steadily since 2012 and is now close to EU average.
Community Innovation Survey
How many innovative companies do we have in Greece?
According to the Community Innovation Survey (CIS), the reference survey on innovation of enterprises in the EU, 73% of Greek companies are innovative.
The CIS metric for Greek innovative companies has seen a 20-point increase in less than a decade. Now that’s pretty impressive.
R&D Expenditure
Investments in R&D are key to increasing the outputs of a country’s innovation efforts.
Greece has seen an important increase in R&D expenditure over the past decade.
Greek R&D expenditure has doubled in 15 years, rising from a pre-crisis peak of €1.6 billion in 2008 to €3.1 billion in 2022.
Total R&D Expenses as percentage of GDP have also shot up from 0.7% to 1.5%.
The trend is undoubtedly positive.
Sustained optimism
Investing in R&D, supporting Greek universities, removing (rather than creating) barriers for tech entrepreneurship and promoting successful examples of innovators can all help improve the pace of innovation.
Greece has a long way to go, but it is clearly making progress.
Time to step up our game even more.
