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

Spain performs well for some of the indicators, particularly “Participation in life-long learning” and “Population with tertiary education. However, it scores below the European average for Innovation and Entrepreneurshiprelated indicators such as “Innovation expenditures” or “EPO patents per million population”. In addition, its performance has worsened for five out of the 25 indicators (“S&E graduates”; “participation in life-long learning”; “SMEs innovating in-house”, “USPTO patents per million population”; and “community industrial designs”), and that no improvement has been reported for 11 indicators (44%) such as “ICT expenditures”, “public and business R&D expenditures”, or “share of medium-high and high technology R&D”. These results demonstrate that Spain lags behind the most advanced European countries in the field of Science and Technology.

With the purpose of reversing this situation and placing Spain at the level of the most advanced European countries in innovation, the country has implemented a set of measures included in the National Reform Programme (NRP) and the new National Plan for Scientific Research, Development and Technological Innovation (VI National Plan for the period 2008–2011).

Main innovation challenges

• Increase in the number of medium-high and high technology industries.
• Increasing availability of human capital and skills.
• Venture capital investment.

Action

So far, improvement has been made for several of those measures – the Entrepreneurial Programme provides financial support in the establishment of new technology-based enterprises, hundreds of researchers have benefitted from the INGENIO Programme and the broadband penetration rate has increased in relation to 2006. However, some of the measures have not been evaluated yet as their implementation was undertaken very recently. It is also not clear if some of them will be sufficient to address one of the main challenges of Spain – the limited number of medium-high and high-technology enterprises. The Ministry of Science and Innovation has recently been created to support RD&I policies.