THE IMPACT OF ICT ON INNOVATION PERFORMANCE IN EUROPE. CASE OF ROMANIA

The aim of this paper is to analyze the impact of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) on the innovation performance of the European Union (EU) countries. We have used two composite indicators to measure the Innovation performance and the ICT performance of each of the EU-28 countries: the Summary Innovation Index (SII) – created on the initiative of the European Commission and computed yearly since 2001 – and the Networked Readiness Index (NRI) – created by the World Economic Forum, in collaboration with INSEAD, and published yearly since 2002. Using unifactorial linear regressions, we have modeled the relationship between SII and NRI at country level, respectively, between SII and each of the four subindexes of NRI. We’ve deepened our analysis for the case of Romania, in order to find effective ways to foster innovation through ICT.