​​During the 140th plenary session of the Committee of the Regions, members adopted the opinion "Regional Innovation Scoreboard and its impact on place-based policies" by EA group's SEDEC commission coordinator, Mikel Irujo Amezaga.

In the opinion, Mr Irujo proposes a number of suggestions on how future editions of the Scoreboard could be improved from the point of view of methodology and transparency, in the first place by making data sources freely accessible. Among other things, the draft opinion proposes a reassessment of current Scoreboard indicators and analysis of the weight of various individual indicators when calculating the final index. It also suggests adding recommendations on the EU tools that can help to improve the indicators and introducing assessment of "resource efficiency and effectiveness" which would measure results in more disadvantaged regions more realistically.

"The Regional Innovation Scoreboard should become a tool that helps EU regions to develop their innovation ecosystems and implement on the ground EU's political agenda, including the Green Deal", Mr Irujo said during the presentation of the opinion. 

The opinion also suggests broadening the concept of smart specialisation, topic on which Mr Irujo also drafted a report in 2017, and increasing the use of the Regional Innovation Scoreboard in benchmarking and benchlearning regional innovation policies as a way to tackle innovation divide. 

"The Regional Innovation Scoreboard 2021 should also address the issue of building regional resilience through innovation, in the light of the Covid-19 pandemic. Likewise, it would be useful to assess the vulnerability of regional smart specialisation strategies in times of crisis", Mr Irujo added.

The Regional Innovation Scoreboard a comparative assessment of innovation performance of Europe's regions (238 regions across 23 European countries in 2019) based on the methodology of the European Innovation Scoreboard and also containing contextual data that can be used to analyse and compare structural economic, business and socio-demographic structure differences between regions.