The Global Innovation Index 2012

4
THE GLOBAL INNOVATION INDEX 2012 1: The Global Innovation Index 2012
governments have pledged to avoid
cutbacks in science and R&D or even
increase spending.6 Ideally, spending
measures decided by governments
need to marry short-term demand
stimulus with longer-lasting growth
objectives. Most governments have
also identified financial or structural
policies to foster new employment
and growth in areas such as research,
the health sector, transport, and the
environment. There is now a need to
monitor and assess how and whether
these stimulus measures have been
implemented and to determine the
impacts on short-term demand and
longer-term economic foundations
and the society more broadly. This
applies to programmes decided in
2009 and to those that are in the
offing.
To support these debates, to
guide polices, and to highlight good
practices, metrics are required to
assess innovation and related policy
performance. For this purpose the
GII is timely and relevant.
Stronger innovation linkages for global
growth
The theme of this year’s GII report,
‘Stronger innovation linkages for
global growth’, underlines the
importance of productive interactions
among innovation actors—
firms, the public sector, academia,
and society—in modern innovation
ecosystems (see also Chapter 4 of this
report).
More and more attention is
focused on the interplay of institutions
and the interactive processes
in the creation, application, and diffusion
of knowledge, human capital,
and technology. In particular,
the transfer of scientific results
and inventions and their application
to societal challenges in high- and
lower-income countries alike is garnering
attention.
In the policy debate and the literature,
emphasis is put on the increasingly
collaborative nature of innovative
processes. Such collaboration
has been facilitated as innovation
processes have become more fragmented
and ‘open’.7 As studied in
several chapters of this publication,
the role of the Internet more generally
has been crucial in introducing
changes to the innovation process
and to related outputs.8 Markets for
technologies that allow for knowledge
diffusion have added a further
boost to collaboration.9
Accordingly, in the last decades
in high- and middle-income countries
alike, various national strategies
have aimed to improve the linkages
between the various innovation
actors, most notably the science system
and higher education, the government,
the private sector, and
increasingly also the not-for-profit
sector such as philanthropies and
nongovernmental organizations.
The measurement agenda has
evolved to address the systemic dimension
of innovation10—that is, the activities
of multiple innovation actors
and linkages among them.11 The
challenge is to detect and quantify
the dynamic and often informal
nature of linkages and their efficacy.
This policy and measurement
ambition is far from being important
only to advanced economies. It
is also critical in most low- and middle-income
country contexts, where
innovation linkages are, on average,
weaker than in high-income countries.
Furthermore, low- and middle-income
countries have been
the source of incremental innovation.12
One challenge is to appropriately
quantify the extent of this
type of innovation and the required
linkages.
Yet again, the GII intends to
contribute to the policy and measurement
debate on linkages. It does
so by introducing and discussing relevant
metrics that are complemented
by substantive chapters that analyse
this theme in the context of particular
country settings (Chapter 3 on
Saudi Arabia, Chapter 5 on the Golf
Cooperation Council, Chapter 6 on
the Russian Federation, and Chapter
7 on India) and with a focus on science-industry
linkages (Chapters 4
and 8), public-private partnerships
(Chapter 2), and the role of information
and communication technologies
and the Internet (Chapters 8, 9,
and 10).
The rationale for the Global Innovation
Index
The GII project was launched by
INSEAD in 2007 with the simple
goal of determining how to find
metrics and approaches to better
capture the richness of innovation
in society and go beyond such traditional
measures of innovation as the
number of research articles and the
level of R&D expenditures.13
There were several motivations
for setting this goal. First, innovation
is important for driving economic
progress and competitiveness—both
for developed and developing
economies. Many governments
are putting innovation at the
centre of their growth strategies.
Second, there is awareness that the
definition of innovation has broadened—it
is no longer restricted to
R&D laboratories and to published
scientific papers. Innovation could
be and is more general and horizontal
in nature, and includes social innovations
and business model innovations
as well. Last but not least, recognizing
and celebrating innovation
in emerging markets is seen as critical
for inspiring people—especially
the next generation of entrepreneurs
and innovators.