Innovation in the economies of Central and Eastern Europe – long-term benchmarking

Innovation is an important determinant of development that is of particular importance in developing and emerging economies. For this reason, the aim of this research is to analyze innovation in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe from a long-term perspective, covering 2015-2022, and to classify the studied economies taking into account the dynamic approach to the development of innovation. The article uses data from the European Innovation Scoreboard (EIS), descriptive statistics, and cluster analysis as a method of unsupervised learning. The research results indicate the existence of five innovation development paths in the analyzed region: (1) very low average innovativeness, regressive or low rate of innovation change, very large distance to the EU average; (2) low average innovativeness, high pace of innovation changes, large distance to the EU average; (3) medium average innovation, low rate of innovation change, large distance to the EU average; (4) high average innovation, high rate of innovation change, small distance to the EU average; and (5) very high average innovation, low rate of innovation change, zero distance to the EU average.