According to the European Innovation Scoreboard commissioned by the Directorate-General for Enterprise and Industry of the European Commission, and prepared by the Maastricht Economic and social Research and training centre on Innovation and Technology (MERIT) Portugal’s overall innovation performance places it among the group of “catching-up countries”. Portugal’s innovation performance has been increasing relative to the average EU trend over the past five years.
Portugal performs best on Innovation & entrepreneurship, in particular on the indicators Share of SMEs innovating in-house, ICT expenditures and Share of SMEs which have introduced organisational innovations. Portugal has relative weaknesses in the dimensions of Knowledge creation and Intellectual property, in particular in the indicators of Business R&D expenditures and all forms of patenting. Despite its lower level of performance in Intellectual property, Portugal is showing a high level of efficiency of transforming inputs into Intellectual Property outputs while the efficiency in Applications outputs is below average.