Austrian Research and Technology Report 2020

Austria’s position from the perspective of global 
innovation rankings
Austria’s current performance is above average in 
many areas of RTI, including the digital skills of its 
population. In others, however, such as ICT use by 
companies, its potential for innovation could be ex-
ploited even further, enabling the country to pro-
gress to a leading position in the innovation rankings 
in the future. One meaningful way to get a general 
28 See Council for Research and Technology Development (2019a).
29 See World Economic Forum (WEF) (2019).
30 See Cornell University, INSEAD and WIPO (2019).
31 See European Commission (2019b).
32 See Federation of German Industries (BDI) et al. (2020).
idea of Austria’s place in the international standings 
might be to consolidate the many individual areas of 
innovation into a single index and thus obtain an 
overall value for Austria that can be compared 
against different countries. Three main overarching 
international indices for innovation are presented be-
low: the Global Competitiveness Index,
29
the Global 
Innovation Index
30
and the European Innovation 
Scoreboard.
31
They are complemented by the Innova-
tion Indicator,
32
which is produced in Germany. All 
the indices listed here use different indicators with 
different strategic objectives, which causes a degree 
of variance in terms of how data are presented as 
well as discrepancies in the rankings.
The Global Competitiveness Index (GCI) compares 
economies in terms of their competitiveness and is 
based on indicators that reflect economic productiv-
ity and growth. These indicators are grouped into 
twelve overarching dimensions representing corre-
sponding composite indices: 1) Institutions, 2) Infra-
structure, 3) Macroeconomic stability, 4) ICT adop-
tion, 5) Health, 6) Skills, 7) Product market, 8) Labour 
market, 9) Financial system, 10) Market size, 11) Busi-
ness dynamism, and 12) Innovation capability.
With a GCI score of 76.6 in 2019, Austria came 
21st out of the economies analysed, up one on the