The Relationship between the Information Society and Regional Innovation Performance in the Central and Eastern European Regions

It has been an important challenge for Central and Eastern European (CEE) regions to find their own opportunities after the transition in the frame of the new economic regulations and environment. One of these opportunities might be the adoption of innovative and new products. These might open the door to gain competitive advantages for a given region and they might have an effect on establishing new regional entrepreneurships or new cooperation, as well. The regional socioeconomic and cultural environment has an important role as the background of the regional innovation processes. This setting has been determined by the growing amount of information and technological innovations in the last decades. The information and the use of into-communication technologies have got a central role in the socio-economic processes by the permanently developing technology and faster communication opportunities. Therefore it can be assumed that there is a relatively strong relationship between the development of information society and the regional innovation performance. This paper focuses on this relationship in the Central and Eastern European regions. The "Regional Index of Information Society" is applied to characterize the information society in the analysed regions. This index measures the development level of information society in the European regions and it has been created from statistical indicators regarding information society. The regional innovation performance is measured by the Regional Innovation Scoreboard of the European Commission in our analysis. The goals of the paper are to discover and characterise this connection between these two processes.