Monica Mihaela MATEI, PhD Email: matei.monicamihaela@gmail.com Professor Liliana SPIRCU, PhD Email: spircu2008@yahoo.com Department of Economic Informatics and Cybernetics The Bucharest Academy of Economic Studies RANKING REGIONAL INNOVATION SYSTEMS ACCORDING TO THEIR TECHNICAL EFFICIENCY- A NONPARAMETRIC APPROACH Abstract. The new economic strategy of the European Union aims to improve EU` performance in innovation. An important step in achieving this goal is represented by the assessment of the innovation process at regional or national level. The purpose of this study is to measure and compare the performance of the Regional Innovation Systems using a nonparametric approach. Thus the efficiency of the decision making units represented by Regional Innovation Systems is estimated using a nonparametric frontier model: data envelopment analysis (DEA). Statistical inference for DEA estimators is based on bootstrap, a very well-known resampling method. The estimated efficiency scores obtained from DEA models help us identify best practice in the field of regional innovation. Keywords: regional innovation systems, technical efficiency, DEA, bootstrap. JEL Classification P48, C14, C15, C67 1. Introduction The new economic strategy launched by the European Commission for the coming decade in order to go out of the crisis is Europe 2020. One of the objectives associated to this strategy is to develop a smart growth by improving EU’s performance in innovation. The reason behind this idea is based on the belief that innovation can be translated into new goods and services thus creating growth and jobs. We think that high performance in innovation can be achieved by the implementation of an assessment procedure dedicated to innovation systems. One concrete action that has been initiated in this regard is the development of a tool meant to help assessing the innovation performance in EU Member States. This tool is known as Innovation Union Scoreboard (IUS) and includes innovation indicators which capture the performance of the national innovation systems and trend analyses for the EU 27 Member States. The same tool was developed for the evaluation of regional innovation systems – RIS (Regional Innovation Scoreboard). Even if there are many different definitions of the innovation concept there are