Evaluation of innovativeness of Turkey with respect to european union integration

This thesis consists of four main parts. The first part presents information about the definition and classification of innovation. Product innovation, process innovation, technical innovation, administrative innovation, organizational innovation, radical innovation and incremental innovation are major headings in this part. The second part of the thesis mainly focuses on innovation process. In addition to various innovation process methods, Schumpeterian, Neo-Classical and Porter's approaches are studied and the basic of the National Systems of Innovation is presented. The third part of the thesis includes European Innovation Scoreboard 2002 (EIS). This scoreboard analyzes statistical data in four areas, which are human resources; knowledge creation; transmission and application of knowledge; innovation finance, output and markets. The scoreboard's statistical data are prepared for 21 indicators of innovation for each EU member states as well as 13 candidate countries including Turkey. The fourth part concentrates on the analysis of innovation on enlargement countries. According to Innovation Scoreboard, the Candidate countries perform favorably compared to the EU for the share of the working-age population with tertiary education (with Bulgaria, Cyprus, Estonia and Lithuania equal to or above the EU mean), the employment share for high-tech manufacturing (with the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovenia close to or above the EU mean), ICT expenditures (with the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary and Latvia close to or above the EU mean), and the stock of inward FDI (with the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary and Malta above the EU mean). For 3 indicators, these candidate countries are above the best performing EU member state: Lithuania for both working-age populations with tertiary education and high-tech venture capital, and Malta for sales of 'new to market' products. Innovative capabilities in the Candidate countries are dominated by less than half of the countries, with 88% of the leading slots taken by six countries: Estonia (8), the Czech Republic and Slovenia (7 each), Lithuania and Hungary (5 each), and Malta (4). Latvia occurs twice, and Cyprus, Slovakia and Turkey once. Poland, Romania and Bulgaria are never among the top three performing Candidate countries. This thesis point outs some unrevealed facts of the Innovation Scoreboard 2002. The data, which are taken from EIS, originally developed in order to form the following tables: the comparison of the GDPs, population of candidate countries, business expenditure on R&D and public expenditure on R&D. Those figures yield that Turkey has the highest rank in GDP, population and public expenditure on R&D and second best in business expenditure on R&D. The current performance and the results of Swot Analysis of Turkey are also presented in the final part of the thesis. Turkey's SMEs innovating in house and new to market production are above the European Union mean. Public and business R&D in Turkey has good grades among all the indicators. In Swot Analysis, the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats in innovation point of view of Turkey are given. The discussion about the results is summarized in the conclusion part of this thesis.