Measuring What Converts: Identification Limits of the European Regional Innovation Data

The Regional Innovation Scoreboard is the principal evidence base for European regional innovation policy. This paper asks what that source can identify, using the sales of new-to-market and new-to-firm innovations across 218 European regions over four Community Innovation Survey waves as a demonstration case. Three boundaries emerge. First, the annual file replicates biennial survey values, so the nominal eight-year panel holds four independent observations per region; ignoring this understates standard errors on registry indicators by up to 40 per cent and reverses one coefficient sign. Second, the leading regressor is negatively associated with innovative sales between regions and positively within them, and leave-one-country-out validation fails in levels but not on within-region deviations, locating much of the between variation in a national component, whether it reflects survey implementation or genuine national differences. Third, flexible learners outperform the linear specification only when validation folds share information within regions and country-waves, a result that rests on 218 regions and 21 countries, since the four survey waves alone could not rank the learners. Within these boundaries, only the SME product innovation incidence, partly linked to the outcome by definition, and trademark activity are associated with innovative revenue, and all estimates are correlational. A taxonomy built on the inputs alone is nearly orthogonal to the official classification. The Scoreboard supports longitudinal inference about a region’s own trajectory, not cross-sectional benchmarking.