As the natural environment increasingly suffers from the loss of biodiversity, pollution and climate change, the relationship between innovation performance and environment (and thus socio-economic) sustainability grows in importance. Indeed, enterprises, public sector organisations and researchers are under increasing pressure to come up with innovations that generate environmental benefits and address societal challenges.

EU level policy developments, such as the European Green Deal and the Recovery plan for Europe, underline the need for the European Innovation Scoreboard (EIS) to take account of the pivotal role of research and innovation in contributing to societal challenges. The exploratory report examined all relevant indicators and proposed, after testing, two additional indicators for including in future EIS rounds.