Study of the Level of Innovation in the European Union: Poland Compared to the Leading Countries

Abstract

Knowledge and innovation are key resources of modern economies. The ability to transform knowledge into new products, technologies, marketing methods and organizational solutions (and thus into broadly understood innovations) is not only the basis of entrepreneurship, but also the foundation for building competitive advantage. Thus, supporting innovation remains the main challenge for managers and staff in power, and the very concept of innovation in enterprises, regions and countries is rightly considered an important area of research. Innovation is therefore an economic category that is measurable. The theory and practice of economic life have allowed the development of a number of metrics for measuring innovation, enabling the assessment of not only its level, but also the source of the innovative potential of individual entities. Taking into account the above, the article presents the results obtained by the EU and its individual countries, based on short theoretical considerations regarding the essence of innovation and the methodological basis for its measurement by the European Commission (in the annual European Innovation Scoreboards EIS using the Summary Innovation Index - SII). The basis for the study is the data contained in the EIS from 2016-2023. The article uses the method of analysis, synthesis and graphical presentation of data. The research focused on Poland and Denmark, which was the leader in innovation in the last study, overtaking the long-term front-runner Sweden.