On 22 September 2022, the European Commission (DG R&I/GROW) published the 2022 edition of the European Innovation Scoreboard (EIS).

According to the EIS 2022 “the EU's innovation performance has grown by about 10% since 2015”. Sweden continues to be the EU innovation leader, followed by Finland, Denmark, the Netherlands and Belgium. This year the Netherlands (previously a strong innovator) joins the innovation leaders, Cyprus (previously a moderate innovator) joins the group of strong innovators and Estonia (previously a strong innovator) drops to the group of moderate innovators.

Between 2015 and 2022, innovation performance increased in 26 EU Member States. Performance has increased the most in Cyprus, Estonia, and Greece. However, the EU's innovation divide remains. The performance groups tend to be geographically concentrated, with the Innovation Leaders and most Strong Innovators being located in Northern and Western Europe, and most of the Moderate and Emerging Innovators in Southern and Eastern Europe. Performance differences between the Member States have narrowed within the groups of Innovation Leaders, Strong Innovators and Moderate Innovators. The Emerging Innovators, as a group, are not catching up.

At EU level, the following indicators recorded the highest improvements: Business process innovators, International scientific co-publications, Innovative SMEs collaborating with others, Job-to-job mobility of Human Resources in Science & Technology, Public-private scientific co-publications, and Venture capital expenditures.

In the benchmarking against other European and neighbouring countries, Switzerland came out as the overall Innovation leader in Europe, outperforming all EU Member States. Albania, included for the first time in the EIS, is an Emerging Innovator. The lowest performer of the countries assessed is Ukraine.

At the global level, the EU has surpassed Japan for the first time, and has closed part of its performance gap to some of its other competitors. The EU continues to lag behind South Korea, Australia. Canada and the Unites States, and has a performance lead over China, Brazil, Russia, South Africa, India, Chile and Mexico (which were included for the first time in the EIS). Since 2015, the EU has improved its relative position towards all global competitors, except China.

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