Luxembourg ranks 7th in the 2025 European Innovation Scoreboard, standing out for its attractive research system, skilled human resources and high productivity.
Lena Mårtensson
Published by the European Commission, the European Innovation Scoreboard provides a comparative assessment of the research and innovation performance of EU member states, other European countries and global competitors. In the 2025 edition, Sweden regains its position as the most innovative member state, followed by Denmark, the Netherlands and Finland.
Luxembourg is part of the “strong innovators” group, alongside Ireland, Belgium, Austria, Germany, France and Estonia.
The European Innovation Scoreboard evaluates a broad range of indicators to assess national research and innovation performance. Luxembourg ranks #1 in Europe for the strength of its research system which, according to the study, “performs exceptionally well in terms of international scientific co-publications, and very high quality of its publications”. The country also boasts a particularly high proportion of foreign nationals among its PhD students.
Luxembourg performs exceptionally well in terms of international scientific co-publications, and very high quality of its publications.
European Innovation Scoreboard
Luxembourg also holds the top spot for its human resources, receiving very high scores for the proportion of people with tertiary education and new doctorate graduates. In addition, the report notes that “lifelong learning levels confirm the country’s outstanding performance in terms of human resources, but the performance change has been unstable, decreasing since 2018, but picking up since last year”.
Luxembourg ranks 2nd in the EU for resource and labour productivity as well as for innovation linkages. The strong linkages score is attributed to a high number of public-private co-publications and significant job-to-job mobility among science and technology professionals.
The study also notes that Luxembourg performs above the EU average in digitalisation, largely due to broadband penetration. However, it warns that digital skills are deteriorating, “possibly because of a negative impact of migration on statistics”.
Conversely, Luxembourg scores below the EU average in firm investments and finance and support, highlighting potential areas for improvement.
According to the Scoreboard, the EU’s global innovation performance has increased by 12.6 percentage points since 2018. An extended analysis, which includes 12 European countries outside the EU, confirms that Switzerland remains the most innovative European country for the eight consecutive year.
