Diffusion Efficiency of Innovation among EU Member States: A Data Envelopment Analysis

Abstract

Innovation, in contemporary times, has been established as the lynchpin of growth and national competitive advantage among countries. Supranational and national resources have jointly combined to create sound innovation strategies and diffusion policies for member states in recent times. However, there is the question of whether increased innovation translates to effective diffusion of innovation. With this in mind, the present research aims to comparatively assess and evaluate the efficiency of diffusion of innovation of European Union member states in reference to their European Innovation Survey rankings. Using the Charnes, Cooper and Rhodes (CCR) model of Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA), the present research found contrasting diffusion efficiency scores of member states with different innovation performances as most innovative member states had much lower efficiency scores compared to some supposedly weak innovating member states. We also computed the input-redundancy and output-deficiency of member states, provided recommendations for efficient input-output combinations based on findings of respective member states and innovation groups, and finally, outlined directions for future studies.

R&D in Europe: Sector Decomposition of Sources of (in)Efficiency

“…DEA applications can be found in the following papers. One study [38] observed 28 European Union member states in the year 2018. The authors used the following variables in the study: new doctorate graduates per 1000 people, lifelong learning (population aged 25-64 involved in education), degree to which individuals pursue entrepreneurial activities, public sector R&D expenditures, venture capital investments and private sector R&D expenditure per GDP, non R&D expenditure, employment in knowledge-intensive activities, and sales of new-to-market and new-to-firm innovations.…”

The triple helix in developed countries: when knowledge meets innovation?

“…On the other hand, the Latin American and Caribbean economies generally lag behind North America and Europe in creating innovationfriendly environments mainly due to problems related to human capital formation, the conduct and impact of research, and institutional aspects (Aguilar-Barcel o and Higuera-Cota, 2019). Nevertheless, in line with the findings of Anderson and Stejskal (2019), the strong innovation results of several countries, such as Chile and Colombia are not matched by their efficiency management (Aguilar-Barcel o and Higuera-Cota, 2019). The DEA methodology applied to five selected South American countries between 1990 and 2018 showed that the dynamism of the development initiatives passes through the generation of dynamic interactions of all the helices.…”

“…The evaluation of the efficiency and performance of the innovation system remains a high priority in order to improve innovation policies and practices. A data envelopment analysis (DEA) methodology has been successfully applied to measure the efficiency of innovation systems on both national ( Pan et al., 2010 ; Cullmann et al., 2011 ; Afzal, 2014 ; Tarnawska and Mavroeidis, 2015 ; Prokop and Stejskal, 2017 ; Anderson and Stejskal, 2019 ; Aguilar-Barceló and Higuera-Cota, 2019 ; De la Vega et al., 2019 ) and regional level ( Zabala-Iturriagagoitia et al., 2007 ; Chen and Guan, 2012 ; Broekel et al., 2018 ; Fadeyi et al., 2019 ; Zemtsov and Kotsemir, 2019 ; Zhuang et al., 2021 ). When analysing the efficiency of innovation systems, the DEA methodology is usually used by examining the input-output components in order to model a robust efficiency measurement.…”

Socio-Economic Efficiency of Distribution the Innovative Diffusion in the Different Developed Systems/Countries

“…Table 4 presents a fragment of the indicators system for the national level, formed on the results of scientific research by H. Anderson and J. Stejskal [11], M. Afzal [12], P. Koiuda and I. Sheiko [2], H. Moon [13], A. Rickne [14].…”