Summary:

National and regional strategies and policies on innovation have been prioritized and innovation is now core to most EU funds and strategies. However, regions are not (should not be) alike in terms of innovation and innovation policy. The development strategies based on innovativeness ideas must include specific local conditions. Effective actions and efforts, to create good environment for innovativeness must bring tangible results. The aim of the paper is comparison of innovativeness on different regions types according to territorial typology: rural, intermediate and urban.  The research questions are: Does innovativeness depends on regional typology: urban-rural? Do remote, less developed rural areas have also low achievements (poor performance) in this regard? Innovation output is measured using its hard result, which is number of patent application per capita. To examine group differences according to the innovativeness, the Kruskal-Wallis test was conducted. The test statistic showed, that there is no statistically significant difference between patent applications on different regions types. It has been found that the highest variable value in the whole sample has been calculated in rural group, for rural regions in Switzerland.