The study aims to study the role of leadership in innovative development, including opportunities arising from the attractiveness of countries for intellectual migrants. The novelty of the research is in justifying the authors’ approach to assessing leadership development at the macroeconomic level and its use for defining the peculiarities of leadership development in the EU and assessing the links with of innovative development and attraction of countries for intellectual migrants. Considering leadership as an important feature of the macroeconomic environment for countries’ development, the correlation analysis was used to test hypotheses about the positive impact of leadership on (a) the attractiveness of countries for intellectual migrants; (b) the innovative development of countries. The resulting pairwise correlation coefficients for the EU show a strong relationship between the level of leadership and a country’s ability to attract (0.776) and retain talent (0.846), attract highly educated workers (0.757) and foreign entrepreneurs (0.780). A positive impact of leadership on innovative development is confirmed by the links with the overall value of the Global Innovation Index (0.825), the Growth of innovative companies (0.768) and the Entrepreneurial employee activity rate (0.599). The obtained findings prove the importance of leadership development as an important driver of talent attraction and the generation of innovative ideas.