My Top 5 Innovative Nations in Europe 2011 Watch List

Since I am living in Europe, it’s pretty natural to be interested in Europe’s competitiveness and ability to innovate. And I am interested to know where the "locomotives" of European high-tech innovation are situated today. How successful are they? What do they do? What trends do they set? What can be learnt from them?

The easiest way is to look into the recognized scoreboards such as Innovation Union Scoreboard (IUS) and Global Innovation Index (GIS).
So, according to the IUS the most innovative nations in Europe are:

1. Switzerland
2. Sweden
3. Denmark
4. Germany
5. Finland

GIS ranking provides slightly different results:

1. Switzerland
2. Sweden
3. Denmark
4. Finland
5. Netherlands

To check independently these results I decided to take the Red Herring Top 100 Europe list for 2011. This is the group of 100 companies that are the most innovative from a pool of hundreds contenders from across Europe. The highest number of winners in the list have Sweden (14), United Kingdom (14), France (12), Switzerland (10), Finland (8) and Netherlands (8). But does this tell the whole story? You cannot compare France and Switzerland by the absolute figures because those countries have different population.
So I transformed the ranking by taking into the account the population factor. The indicator that I use is the number of companies the nation has at Red Herring Top 100 Europe list per one million of its population.


And, correspondingly, the weighted top 5 Red Herring list in Europe includes:

1. Sweden                                  1,49
2. Finland                                   1,48
3. Switzerland                             1,28
4. Denmark                                1,07
5. Netherlands                            0,48

Combining those three lists into one I’ve got finally my own TOP 5 of innovative countries in Europe:

1. Switzerland
2. Sweden
3. Denmark
4. Finland
5. Netherlands

And I am pretty comfortable with this watch list of innovation trendsetters in Europe. All of them are in top 10 of GIS 2011, where four of them outperform the United States of America.