16th in the EU and 92.1% of the average: Cyprus takes its innovation numbers to Kyoto

Demetris Skourides, Cyprus' Chief Scientist, represented the country at the ministerial roundtable of the 23rd Science and Technology in Society (STS) Forum in Kyoto, Japan, which ran from 4 to 6 October 2026. He attended on behalf of the Deputy Ministry of Research, Innovation and Digital Policy, at a forum that gathers political leaders, government officials, scientists, academics and business figures around the social consequences of technological change.

His line at the roundtable tied three things together: technological change, social needs and geopolitical developments. The argument was for policy that makes emerging technologies usable while spreading the benefits across society and the economy rather than concentrating them — with weight placed on basic research, faster knowledge transfer out of the labs, and international cooperation.

The numbers he brought are the more interesting part. In the European Innovation Scoreboard 2026, Cyprus climbed one place to 16th among EU member states. It stays in the Moderate Innovator group, but its performance now reaches 92.1 per cent of the EU average — against 86.4 per cent for the Moderate Innovator group as a whole. The year-on-year move was a 4.1-point score increase, the third-largest annual improvement anywhere in the EU.

One sub-score stands out: Cyprus ranks first in the EU on the Scoreboard's "Innovators" dimension, which measures how much innovation activity SMEs are actually doing. That is a genuinely unusual result for an economy this size, and it is the statistical version of a claim the ecosystem has been making for years — that the activity is real at the small-company end, and that the bottleneck sits elsewhere, in scale-up capital and in moving research into companies.

Alongside the panels, Skourides held bilateral discussions with ministers from Egypt, Argentina and Slovenia on research cooperation. No agreements were announced.

Read it next to the rest of the month and a pattern shows up rather than a one-off trip. The same ministry took a chips-and-small-economies argument to Brussels in late September, sent Deputy Minister Nicodemos Damianou to the AI & Digital Bridge Forum in Astana from 1 to 3 October, and has the Research and Innovation Foundation running a public consultation on the 2028–2034 funding portfolio until 2 November. Kyoto is the outward-facing half of a campaign whose domestic half is a questionnaire — and the Scoreboard figures are the first independent evidence this year that the campaign has something to point at.

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