Innovation Europe > News > Innovation EU Vol1-1 > Lithuania

The general strengths of its national innovation system lie in the well-developed higher-education sector, with strong science and technology research tradition and engineering orientation. However, there are weak links between business and higher education and R&D communities, which result in low value-added innovations, developed without input from the R&D sector. Lithuania is facing a major challenge in converting its innovation inputs into outputs, in terms of knowledge applications and intellectual property. The number of innovative enterprises remained low, although their turnover made up 52.3% of total turnover of Lithuanian enterprises.

Main innovation challenges

• Improving skills for innovation and entrepreneurial attitudes.
• Building R&D capabilities in firms and development of a sound R&D base.
• Development of knowledge-intensive clusters across public knowledge poles.

Action

Lithuania has made tremendous progress in innovation policy-making and implementation, generally due to the Lisbon process and implementation of NRP. Structural funds gave a real base to implement and sustain a wide range of innovation support measures, both in the public and private business domain. The set of measures implemented has intensified the orientation of enterprises towards innovation, especially those with R&D-based capabilities. New policies could focus on:

• The creation and development of new technology-based and intellectual activity-based firms.
• The development of an innovation and creativity culture in all sectors of the economy.