Europe’s innovation performance continues to improve. The European Innovation Scoreboard 2026 reports that EU innovation performance has increased by 11.6 percentage points since 2019, with further growth between 2025 and 2026.

Although the scoreboard focuses on Europe and neighbouring countries, its findings have wider global relevance. It shows that national innovation performance depends not simply on investment or research excellence, but on the interaction between talent, knowledge, finance, entrepreneurship, collaboration and the ability to turn ideas into impact.

Universities are central to this system. The scoreboard measures many areas in which higher education makes a direct contribution, including doctoral graduates, tertiary education, international research collaboration, highly cited publications, international doctoral students and partnerships between public research and business.

Sweden, Denmark and the Netherlands continue to lead within the EU, while South Korea remains the strongest global competitor and China continues to improve its innovation performance. Different national systems have different strengths, but the underlying lesson is consistent: research capacity must be connected to entrepreneurship, business innovation and wider economic and social priorities.

The UK, one of NCEE’s principal partner countries, illustrates both the opportunity and the challenge. It ranks fourth among the EU and neighbouring countries, performing at 130.5% of the EU average. It has major strengths in doctoral education, highly cited research, venture capital and collaboration between innovative SMEs.

However, the UK country profile also identifies a persistent gap between creating knowledge and converting it into commercial outputs and intellectual assets at scale. This is not solely a UK issue. Many countries and regions are asking how they can translate excellent research, talented graduates and promising ideas into new enterprises, better public services, productive businesses and benefits for communities.

This is where the entrepreneurial university becomes essential.

Entrepreneurial universities do more than produce excellent research or support a small number of start-ups. They create cultures in which students and staff can recognise opportunities, experiment, collaborate across disciplines and engage confidently with businesses, government and society. Entrepreneurship should not be confined to business schools, while innovation and commercialisation cannot sit only within specialist teams at the edge of the institution.

Universities also have a crucial role as convenors within their places. They can connect researchers, students, entrepreneurs, investors, SMEs, policymakers and communities. Through international networks, they can also help ideas, expertise and effective practice move between countries, while adapting them to different economic and social contexts.

The scoreboard therefore offers a challenge to university leaders everywhere. Research excellence remains vital, but it is not sufficient. The strength of an innovation system increasingly depends on whether its universities can turn knowledge into action, collaboration into enterprise and innovation into meaningful economic and social impact.