Evaluating the efficiency of regional innovation systems in Europe: DEA approach

For many years, regional innovation systems in Europe have been studied and compared against each other within the framework of the Regional Innovation Scoreboard. However, it has a number of drawbacks, e.g. the combined input-output approach, which does not respond to societal expectations, as in this era of all-round economisation, it is the outputs of the activity that are more important than the potential contained in the inputs. Therefore, in our study we focused on an approach aimed at maximising the outputs achieved by regional innovation systems. The results of the study indicated that, even taking into account negative environmental outcomes, the vast majority of regional innovation systems show efficiency. We have shown that although the regional innovation systems group studied is highly efficient, our research indicates that in the long term, the narrow classification into four innovation groups according to the Regional Innovation Scoreboard methodology is increasingly less useful, as there is a reduction in the number of groups as a result of the ‘shift’ of units to three main ones. We also provided recommendations for EU regional innovation policy on the Regional Innovation Scoreboard tool. Our recommendation is to introduce more differentiated variables into the European survey and to focus more on evaluating the innovation system from the perspective of the results obtained and less on an input approach.