What do you use to generate a dashboard in R?
I think that Shiny is an overkill in this situation and doesn't match your requirement of dashboard reports to be static. I guess, that your use of the term "dashboard" is a bit confusing, as some people might consider that it has more emphasis of interactivity (real-time dashboards), rather than information layout, as is my understanding (confirmed by the "static" requirement).

My recommendation to you is to use R Markdown and knitr, especially since these packages have much lower learning curve than Shiny. Moreover, I have recently run across an R package, which, in my view, ideally suits your requirement of embedding small charts/plots in a report, as presented on your picture above. This package generates static or dynamic graphical tables and is called sparkTable (http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/sparkTable). Its vignette is available here (there is no link to it on the package's home page): http://publik.tuwien.ac.at/files/PubDat_228663.pdf. Should you ever need some interactivity, sparkTable provides some via its simple interface to Shiny.