The competitiveness of the region can be described as “the ability to rival, compete and cooperate, whose aim is to achieve the expected level of socio-economic development by improving labor productivity and creating new jobs”. More and more attention is paid to the role of innovation, which can lead to a significant increase in competitiveness, and investments in research and development (R & D) constitute the most important growth factor.
Undertaking activities at the regional level aimed at stimulating innovativeness, and as a result raising its competitiveness, requires first of all the use of tools allowing to evaluate the obtained effects and possible adjustments to improve the functioning of the regional innovation system.

Monitoring of the Regional Innovation Strategy of the Podkarpackie Voivodeship for the years 2014-2020 will include three levels:
1. Benchmarking of the region’s innovation at the level of the European Union and the country (indicators of groups I and II).
2. Monitoring at the level of smart regional specializations (indicators of group IIIa).
3. Monitoring of the achievement of operational objectives (Group IIIb and IV indicators and proposed in the RSI operational programs).

In the European Union, European Innovation Scoreboard (EIS) reports are regularly published, namely the European Scoreboard in the field of Innovation. The results of research carried out since 2001 allow to measure and compare the potential of innovative EU Member States and its main competitors, such as the USA, Japan and Switzerland. EIS is a “synthetic instrument for assessing the effectiveness of implementing innovation policy and monitoring changes in innovation indicators in individual EU and EFTA member countries”.
The innovation research using the European Innovation Scoreboard methodology of European regions at the NUTS 2 level, ie the European Regional Innovation Scoreboard (ERIS), has been carried out several times. Unfortunately, the number of indicators used has constantly changed. In the first study carried out in 2002, only 7 values ​​characterizing the region’s innovativeness were taken into account. In 2003, the list of indicators was extended to 13, but in 2006, when the study of regions covered 10 new Member States, the set of indicators decreased again to only 7. In the study carried out in 2009, 16 indicators out of 29 proposed in the European Innovation Scoreboard 2009 methodology were used. in relation to the national level. These differences result from the possibility of obtaining data on aggregated indicators at the regional level. However, this is not the only explanation of the changes taking place. The European Commission is also striving to achieve greater convergence with the OECD methodology of innovation research. The data set used in the EIS 2009 survey was modified and reduced to 25 in the following year (and renamed the Innovation Union Scoreboard – IUS). It is also a manifestation of the search for an innovation assessment model based on the best selected indicators.