Innovate Prague 
The new European Innovation Scoreboard 2026 shows where Czechia is keeping pace with Europe and where its innovation potential is still not being fully realised.
Source: European Innovation Scoreboard
According to the latest European Innovation Scoreboard, published in July 2026, Czech innovation progress appears to have stagnated over the past two years. Its innovation performance fell by 2.5 percentage points in 2026, marking the second consecutive year of decline. Czech innovation performance had been growing until 2024, but has fallen for two years since then and in 2026 returned to approximately its 2023 level. Czechia remains among the “Moderate Innovators”, but sits towards the lower end of this group. It ranks 19th in the EU and reaches 79.1% of the EU average.
Source: European Innovation Scoreboard
This is precisely why Malta is worth looking at. In 2025, it was still classified as a “Moderate Innovator”, just like Czechia, but in 2026 it moved into the group of “Strong Innovators”. Its development also shows how quickly even a smaller country can change its innovation profile. While Czech performance has returned roughly to its 2023 level over the past two years, Malta, after several years of fluctuations, made a significant leap in 2026 and moved above the EU average. It also recorded a substantial improvement in business investment.
What is behind Czechia’s slowdown? Weaker results are visible directly at the firm level, including product and process innovation as well as intellectual property. One particularly interesting comparison is between business expenditure on R&D and the share of SMEs introducing process innovations. Czechia remains below the EU average on both indicators, reaching 78.6% of the EU average in business R&D expenditure and 79.7% in process innovation. This suggests that one of the challenges may lie not only in the level of investment in research itself, but also in the ability to translate that investment into concrete changes and innovation within firms. A similar picture emerges for firms’ product innovation, further raising the question of how effectively investment and knowledge are translated into concrete market outcomes.
Source: European Innovation Scoreboard
Another interesting contrast concerns people and productivity. Czechia has an above-average share of people with advanced digital skills, reaching 121.6% of the EU average, as well as a relatively high share of foreign doctoral students. At the same time, it significantly lags behind in labour productivity, which stands at just 46.6% of the EU average, as well as in the mobility of highly skilled workers between employers. This raises another question: does the Czech innovation ecosystem have enough talent, or is it rather struggling to make full use of its potential and connect it more effectively across research, companies and new projects?
Source: European Innovation Scoreboard
A similar contrast can be seen in financing. While cooperation among innovative SMEs reaches 122.7% of the EU average, venture capital stands at just 12.6%. This places Czechia only 24th out of the EU’s 27 Member States on this indicator. A lack of venture capital can become particularly significant when an innovative project is trying to move from an initial solution towards faster growth and expansion into a broader market.
Source: European Innovation Scoreboard
For Prague, this raises above all the question of how to better connect existing talent, cooperation and new ideas with the capital that can enable them to grow. The opportunity may therefore lie not only in creating new initiatives, but above all in ensuring that existing innovation potential is more often transformed into new companies, products and a stronger market position.
Prepared by: Katarina Benkova and PII Analytical Team