Along with Cyprus, Greece, Italy and Lithuania, Estonia's performance in the area has improved by more than 25 percentage points since 2014, BNS reports, with Belgium, Croatia, Finland and Sweden also seeing strong improvement.

The latter is overall scoreboard leader, with Finland, Denmark and Belgium occupying the next three spots. Estonia is in ninth place.

The European Innovation Scoreboard, published by the European Commission, analyses performance not only within the EU, but also with states outside the union, in the field of innovation performance and the relative strengths and weaknesses of national innovation systems.

The 2021 scoreboard was published Monday, while an ongoing phenomenon sees most leaders in the field concentrated in northern and western Europe and the moderate and emerging performers to be found in southern and eastern Europe.

Overall, the EU is continuing to improve in innovation, this year's results found, with the average level being a little under 13 percent since 2014, and also convergence noted between the lowest-performing states and the highest-performance, the commission's representation in Estonia says.

The EU also continues to outperform both developed countries such as Australia, the U.S. and Canada, and emerging ones such as Brazil, China and Russia, the union says of itself.

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