Research and Innovation Challenges in EU Member States. A Systematic and Semantic Analysis of Erawatch and Rio Reports

This paper aims to identify, synthesise and classify in a systematic way the most relevant challenges for R&I performance in the EU 27 Member States over the last decade. To tackle this issue, we develop a semantic analysis of the assessments included in the European Commission ERAWATCH and RIO reports, allowing for picking out commonalities and differences across reports and challenges over the years considered. These reports were elaborated annually and monitored R&I performance in the EU Member States. Each report was written by between 2 and 3 national experts located in each Member State of the EU and identified between 2 and 5 challenges per country and per year. In total, 189 reports and more than 800 challenges were analysed and countries were clustered according to the main challenges they face. By identifying, classifying and clustering the main bottlenecks for the development of R&I activities at national and European levels, this research aims to provide comprehensive insights on key obstacles and challenges to be tackled by R&I policy in the near future, both at EU and Member State level. The findings presented in this paper are conceived as a basis to develop further research on the degree of alignment between the challenges identified and the EU-level and country-specific policy responses to these challenges