Innovation performance of EU countries in context of R&D: R&D trap risk in Slovakia?

Katarína Belanová (), Pavol Ochotnický () and Rudolf Sivák ()
Additional contact information
Katarína Belanová: Bratislava University of Economics and Finance
Pavol Ochotnický: Bratislava University of Economics and Finance
Rudolf Sivák: Bratislava University of Economics and Finance

Journal of Innovation and Entrepreneurship, 2025, vol. 14, issue 1, 1-22

Abstract: Abstract Expenditures in research and development (R&D) and their transformation in innovations are unanimously considered in the academic literature to be one of the key drivers of sustainable economic growth, total factor productivity, as well as the competitiveness of companies and national economies. The paper examines the dependence of the level of innovation performance of European countries on the countries’ expenditures on R&D. Although this dependence appears to be significant and long-term stable, there are significant differences in the evaluation of individual partial components of the innovation performance of countries according to the index used within the European Innovation Scoreboard. The mentioned findings indicate that the process of transformation of R&D into innovative performance is just as important as the amount of R&D expenditure itself. Using the example of the economy of the Slovak Republic, its comparison with EU countries and the Quintuple Helix model, the contribution further demonstrates how the low level of R&D spending in connection with insufficiently developed country subsystems (helices) can lead to economic paradoxes and, without systemic changes, to the unsustainable development path or to the risk of R&D spending trap.

Keywords: Innovations; Research and development; The European Innovations Scoreboard; The Summary Innovations Index; GERCH; The Quintuple Helix model (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1186/s13731-025-00533-5 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:joiaen:v:14:y:2025:i:1:d:10.1186_s13731-025-00533-5

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://innovation-e ... ip.springeropen.com/

DOI: 10.1186/s13731-025-00533-5

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Innovation and Entrepreneurship is currently edited by Elias G. Carayannis

More articles in Journal of Innovation and Entrepreneurship from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().