Antonio Tajani, Vice President of the EC in charge of Industry and Entrepreneurship and Máire Geoghegan-Quinn, Member of the EC in charge of Research, Innovation and Science have hosted a joint press conference on the European Innovation Scoreboard 2010.

They presented, for the first time, the Commission's reinforced annual report comparing innovation performance in the EU-27 Member States. In line with the Innovation Union action plan adopted in October 2010, the European Innovation Scoreboard (EIS) now contains 25 clear performance indicators, to improve comparability between countries.

As well as being a key tool for implementing the Innovation Union, the EIS is an important complement to the Annual Growth Survey adopted under the Europe 2020 Strategy, which underlines again that research and innovation are crucial drivers of growth and essential to a sustainable exit from crisis.

The EIS uses the most recent statistics from Eurostat and other internationally recognised sources available at the time of analysis. The overall ambition of the EIS is to inform policy discussions at national and EU level, by tracking progress in innovation performance within and outside the EU.