Recently the EU published two major documents on Innovation within the EU. Firstly the 2013 Innovation Union Scoreboard (IUS) (download here)  which looks at EU and national performance on Innovation

and secondly the 2012 Regional Innovation Scoreboard (download here) which attempts albeit with fewer datasets to look at innovation performance within regions across the EU. So what does this show for the, EU, the UK and more specifically for the West Midlands.

Methodology

Firstly it is probably worthwhile describing briefly what both documents attempt to do. They in effect piece together different sources of information to produce an overall index of innovation. There will be those amongst you who might wish to discuss the merits of the variables included and also the method of combining them into a single index. That discussion is however for elsewhere; this blog post takes these as read and looks at what these indices…