The European Innovation Scoreboard (EIS) was developed at the request of the Lisbon European Council in 2000 . It focuses on high-tech innovation and provides indicators for tracking the EU's progress towards the Lisbon goal of becoming the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world within the next decade.

The EIS contains 17 main indicators, selected to summarize the main drivers and outputs of innovations. These indicators are divided into four groups: Human resources for innovation (5 indicators); the creation of new knowledge (3 indicators of which one is divided into EPO and USPTO patents); the transmission and application of knowledge (3 indicators); and Innovation finance, outputs and markets (6 indicators).

The EIS complements the Enterprise Policy Scoreboard and other benchmarking exercises of the European Commission. It mainly uses Eurostat data, or private data of sufficient reliability if official data is not available. Six indicators are drawn from the European Commission's Structural indicators.

All indicators have been updated based on data availability as of September 15, 2002. Four indicators could not be updated due to delays in the execution of the third Community Innovation Survey . As a result, the 2002 EIS does not provide trend results for these indicators and it does not contain a summary innovation index similar to the one offered in 2001. Subject to the availability of new CIS data, the 2003 EIS is expected to offer again an updated composite innovation index and a comparison between the index and average trends for each country, which was one of the most interesting features of the 2001 EIS.

The EIS is complemented by six technical papers:

1. Technical Paper No 1: Member States and Associate Countries Detailed results for current and trend data, innovation leaders, relative strengths and weaknesses per country, convergence and divergence analysis between member states and different groups of member states, and country pages with trend diagrams and main policy changes.
2. Technical Paper No 2: Candidate Countries Detailed results for current and trend data, innovation leaders, relative strengths and weaknesses per country, and country pages with both current and trend graphs.
3. Technical Paper No 3: EU Regions Detailed results for currently available data, leading regions, two tentative composite innovation indicators, indicator graphs, and preliminary steps towards the 2003 regional scoreboard.
4. Technical Paper No 4: Indicators and Definitions Full definitions and graphs for all indicators.
5. Technical Paper No 5: Thematic Scoreboard "Lifelong Learning for Innovation" Prototype of a complementary scoreboard on "Lifelong Learning for Innovation".
6. Technical Paper No 6: Methodological Report Overview of five different methods for constructing composite indices, and review of the similarities and differences between the EIS and other European Commission scoreboards.

All technical papers are available from the TrendChart website.