Typology of the EU Countries in Terms of Innovation in the Context of Sustainable Development Assessment

The purpose of the study isseparating the relatively homogeneous classes of the EU countriesin terms of innovation in the context ofsustainable development. Sustainable development monitoring is based on a set of systematized indicators in the areas of social, economic, environmental and institutional-political order. Among the numerous observed processes and phenomena, the ones which combine the orders, contributing to coherent devel-opment (integrated order) are of particular importance. Innovation remains one ofsuch characteristics. Its meas-urement in the research on sustainable development is carried out using 6 indicators (share of net revenues on the sales of innovative products in net revenues on total sales, share of human resources in science and technolo-gy as percentage of economically active population, percentage change in labour productivity, expenditure on R&D against GDP, eco-innovation, the number of inventions filed by residents to the European Patent Office per 1 million population). The data collected within their framework (source - Eurostat) were adopted as the basis for the EU countries classification in terms of their capacity to develop and implement innovations. Multidimensional statistical analysis methods, with particular focus on aggregate measures of development, were applied in the assessment. The conducted research resulted in separating the relatively uniform classes of the EU countries in terms of innovation, including the identification of leaders in the analysed years