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

However, since its economic crisis in 2001, it has experienced dynamic growth and rapid recovery and, with a GDP of over E370bn today, its economy is among the world’s 20 largest.

According to the European Innovation Scoreboard (EIS) 2007, Turkey is one of the lowest-ranking countries in most of the indicators. But, the very poor availability of data prevents the generation of a reliable summary innovation index of the EIS and the identification of trends. In general, with the available data, although Turkey’s overall performance is below that of EU Member States, it has a stronger performance than some Member States on knowledge creation. Since the early 2000s, it has increasingly attached importance to investment in science, technology and innovation.

Main innovation challenges

• Increasing investments in human resources for innovation.
• Promoting research commercialisation from universities.
• Increasing early stage funding.

Action

With the governement’s increased commitment to science, technology and innovation and the recent improvement of macroeconomic conditions, there is a new initial impetus to Turkish innovation policy. However, it needs to increase the number and diversity of innovation measures and focus the policy mix strategically on priorities in order to increase innovation performance. There are also weaknesses to be addressed in innovation governance.

The following policy actions are proposed:

• Build an effective and robust innovation policy that places productive innovation at the heart of all economic, and social development policies, by strengthening the role of the business sector in the innovation process and by broadening the definition of innovation to include non-technological innovation;
• Design and implement innovation policies at both national and regional levels by providing co-ordination, coherence and complementarity between national and regional dimensions;
• Increase co-operation, communication and co-ordination among all stakeholders in the innovation governance system;
• Establish a systematic and continuous monitoring and evaluation system for innovation policy and policy measures.