EVALUATION OF THE EU COUNTRIES' INNOVATIVE POTENTIAL – MULTIVARIATE APPROACH

The aim of the article is to work out a synthetic measure for estimating country's innovation potential (CIP) of EU economies. For the purpose of the research, data from the European Statistical Office (Eurostat) are used and several indicators are organized by four different areas of analysis, i.e. investment expenditure, education, labour market and effects. Applying multi-dimensional statistics allows us to reduce the primary set of diagnostics variables and, simultaneously, identify those which best describe the potential. The final step is linear ordering of EU countries according to their innovative potential on the basis of CIP synthetic measure. The rating is compared with other ratings based on the recognized Summary Innovation Index and Global Innovation Index. The main conclusion is that the methodology of innovativeness assessment remains an open issue and requires further research. The most important task is the selection of indicators, followed by statistical verification in relation to their importance to innovativeness. The results show that there is a tendency to between the author's ratings and other already published ratings of innovativeness