THE JOURNEY TO COMPETITIVENESS: EU SPEEDING UP ON THE ROAD PAVED WITH KNOWLEDGE AND INNOVATION

In the attempt to boost its international competitiveness, the European Union realized that it should enrich the ways to achieve it by using the intangible assets that it holds. Knowledge and intellectual capital, innovation, science and entrepreneurship are key drivers of economic development and renewal. The traditional resources on which economies rely on are scarce, while these ones are abundant and steady. Moreover, this type of assets can easily increase their value through sharing and they trigger multiplicative effects in the economy. The paper tackles these issues and makes an assessment of the degree of innovation in the EU. The study aims to provide an answer to the question of whether EU's overall performance proves that it is truly driven by knowledge and innovation or not. Using a qualitative method of research, this paper identifies innovation patterns of the member states from a geographical perspective. In order to provide a compelling analysis, the data ranges from indicators capturing science and technology activities, firm innovation to the internationalization of research activities and the tertiary-level graduates. The results show substantial discrepancies between the European countries and reveal that knowledge flows scaled by the level of innovation are a localized phenomenon, therefore some countries are more innovation-oriented and they reap the benefits better.