57European Innovation Scoreboard 2016

Croatia is a Moderate Innovator. Innovation performance improved until 2012 and then declined. After a decline until 2010, innovation performance improved until 2012 and then declined again. Performance relative to the EU was above 60% in 2008, but has fallen to less than 54% by 2015.

Croatia is performing below the EU average in most dimensions. It only performs above the EU average in Human resources, due to above-average performance in Youth with upper secondary level education. The weakest performing dimensions are Open, excellent and attractive research systems, Innovators, and Intellectual assets. Non-R&D innovation expenditures is the best performing indicator.

Performance increases in dimensions are observed in Finance and support (6.8%) and Open, excellent and attractive research systems (4.3%), with the largest improvement at the indicator level for Community trademarks (29%). Performance has worsened in Linkages and entrepreneurship (-9.4%), Economic effects (-2.6%) and Innovators (-2.3%), with the indicators declining most being PCT patent applications in societal challenges (-14%), Public-private co-publications (-9.4%) and PCT patent applications (-9.3%).

Provisional CIS 2014 data show improved performance for four and worsened performance for two indicators. The overall impact on the innovation index is expected to be small with the index possibly increasing from 0.280 to 0.281 assuming that for the other indicators performance would not change.

Note: Performance relative to the EU where the EU = 100.

Croatia