The criteria for allocating the new Structural Funds for R+D in the EU (2014-2020) are based on what has been called "Smart Specialization Strategies" (see Van Nistelrooij, 2014). The expressions of interest for these strategies are coming from both European regions and national governments. We search how regions such as Andalusia could impulse the intensification of their eco-innovation strategies into Smart Specialization ones, improving their likely chances of becoming potential perceivers of the European Structural Funds. This research paper establishes the theoretically based relationships between eco-innovation activities, - as a way of achieving the Smart Specialization Strategy label-,and competitiveness. The reference model has been the eco-innovation index provided by the Eco-Innovation Observatory (EIO), a European Independent Institution asked by the European Commission to develop such and index, and its posterior application to the 27 members of the European Union. The eco-innovation concept includes all forms of innovation activities looking to improve outstandingly the environmental protection. This means: new production processes, new products or services, and new management and business methods (Kuehne, 2007). In a first step we have studied the Eco-Innovation Observatory Index from a methodological point of view, considering the very statistical nature of the relevant variables, their explanatory power, their statistical features and properties and so on. The indicators of the Eco-Innovation scoreboard are grouped into five thematic areas or blocks: i) eco-innovation inputs, ii) eco-innovation activities, iii) eco-innovation outputs, iv) environmental outcomes and, v) socio-economic outcomes. The scoreboard shows how well individual Member States perform in different dimensions of eco-innovation compared to the EU average and presents their strengths and weaknesses. We establish the existing relationship between eco-innovation and competitiveness by estimating a statistical model, which proves that reinforcing eco-innovation leads to improvements in competitiveness. According to the obtained relationship, what could be said about the Andalusian competitiveness derived from its eco-innovation activities? Unfortunately enough, the eco-innovation index is only provided by the EIO at national level. One of the challenges faced by this article is to cope with this difficulty. One of the main contributions of this study is the development of a pioneer methodology, enormously useful to build up an approach to the eco-innovation index for Andalusia. In this essay we could only consider three out of the five thematic areas considered in the EIO Index. We couldn't obtain the 16 requested variables or single indicators from any official institution, but only 5 of them instead. Nevertheless, multivariate statistical methods applied to this set of indicators or variables let us conclude that the three thematic areas account for a 65% of the explanatory value of the scoreboard (see Alvarez, Fernandez y Romera, 2014). With the available information we recalculate our "partial" Scoreboard for the 27 European Union countries, i.e., five variables belonging to three thematic areas. Then, we are able to compare Andalusia with the partial Spanish Scoreboard and we have also estimated the Andalusian relative position in the European Union scene. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first academic article that tries to locate the Andalusian eco-innovation scoreboard in the European eco-innovation map. Is such Andalusian eco-innovation scoreboard closer to those of the most eco-innovative countries in the European Union? Cluster analysis and Multidimensional Scaling analysis are some of the tools that we have used to figure out the likely position of this region as compared to the different European eco-innovation levels. Ideally, the suggested mapping would allow to benchmark eventual European perceivers of Structural Funds. The accuracy, reliability and availability of the data used in the study have brought into the fore the convenience of updating the regional eco-innovation Database as is the case for Andalusia. As a further research to improve the yields of this preliminary study we find out that there is an urgent need to develop better regional eco-innovation measures.
