The indicators are at a very aggregated level. This makes it difficult to relate government spending on R&D to the more granular perspective on innovation subsystems aimed for by the Scoreboard. The provision of more disaggregated indicators by Eurostat could support the future programming of research, development and innovation funding. However, the categories underlying the gathering of country data are currently not fit for such a purpose. They are based on the Frascati Manual by the OECD. While the updating of these categories would be desirable, such coordinative processes typically take a lot of time and can be politically charged. A possibility could be for Eurostat to survey novel categories in parallel to the OECD categories.
