"Lithuania's innovation ecosystem has been growing steadily for many years, and this is reflected in the European Innovation Scoreboard. In fact, our country's innovation growth is 10% ahead of the EU as a whole. We are determined to continue on this path, and in 2023-2024 alone, we have a number of new calls for innovation funding that offer even better growth prospects. We must also continue to invest in strengthening the whole ecosystem, fostering cooperation between science and business and developing innovative solutions," said Aušrinė Armonaitė, Minister of the Economy and Innovation.
In the annual Innovation Scoreboard, Lithuania has moved up to 18th place among EU Member States this year, ahead of Portugal. Looking at the period from 2017 to 2024, Lithuania is making sustained progress, peaking in 2024 with a 16 percentage point improvement over the same period. Similar progress can be seen in countries such as Belgium and Italy (+15%).
The European Commission has identified a number of business-related indicators as strengths of Lithuania's innovation ecosystem. The rate of venture capital investment has increased by 17.3% since 2023 to 137.6% of the EU average. Lithuania is also above the EU average in terms of non-R&D innovation expenditure in the business sector (172.6%) and trade mark applications (136.2% of the EU average).
Lithuania is also above the EU average in terms of the number of enterprises using process innovation (105.7%) and the number of persons employed in innovative enterprises (113.1% of the EU average). Lithuania remains one of the leaders in the share of population with tertiary education, at 177.7% of the EU average.
The European Innovation Scoreboard 2024 identifies exports of knowledge-intensive services and business investment in R&D as the country's main weaknesses, and suggests strengthening cooperation between business and academia. From 2023 onwards, there are significant declines in indicators such as firms innovating in product innovation (-42%), innovative firms collaborating with each other (-34.1%) and environmental technologies (-16.3%).
