A Comparative Analysis of National Strategies to Underpin Innovation Progress in Romania and Portugal

Abstract

In the European Innovation Scoreboard (EIS) Romania ranks on the last place being considered a Modest Innovator which continues to allocate under 1% of its GDP to research and development. In this respect, the present study aims to analyze Romania’s innovation performance in comparison with Portugal’s, a Strong Innovator and to propose a set of measures that could be implemented for improving Romania’s position in the EIS. The research methodology consists of a comparative analysis concerning the innovation performance in Romania and Portugal using secondary data analysis gathered from the 2020 Edition of the European Innovation Scoreboard. The study revealed that Portugal and Romania are performing quite differently, with a common starting point as low performers in innovation in 2007. Portugal’s performance in innovation is higher or similar to EU’s average while for the majority of the analyzed indicators, Romania’s position is below Portugal’s and EU’s average. Romania lags behind Portugal in a number of innovation indicators, especially regarding the Human resources and Attractive research systems indicators. Progress have been made in a very slow manner and even if Romania made efforts to increase its innovative capacity and adopted a national strategy for innovation, the situation did not improve very much in this area, remaining a Modest innovator, position in which Romania seems to be stuck for a decade.

Keywords

• innovation
• performance
• european innovation scoreboard
• innovation index
• romania
• portugal