The Global Innovation Index 2012

6. Northern America continues
to be an innovation leader but
needs to address what could
become chronic weaknesses.
The central role of the USA for
global innovation hardly needs
underlining: its universities, its
research institutions, its innovation
clusters, and its firms are
world class and continue to be
a magnet and a model for other
countries. Still, the innovation
rankings of the USA and also
Canada point to the potential
development of weaknesses. A
thorough analysis of USA performance
on a series of 23 key
indicators, when compared with
the performance of the two top
leaders in the overall GII rankings
(Switzerland and Sweden),
shows that the USA is, in the
majority of cases, either performing
less well or seeing its
competitive advantage decrease
in the following areas: current
expenditure on education as
a percentage of gross national
income, percentage of graduates
in science and engineering,
researchers headcount per million
people, gross expenditure
on R&D as a percentage of GDP,
percentage of R&D performed
by business, resident patent application
at the national office (over
GDP in PPP$), and scientific
and technical publications (over
GDP in PPP$). Although the
USA continues to demonstrate
great strengths in many innovation
outputs, and although the
country is still the leader of innovation
in many respects—in particular,
in creating world-class
technology start-ups and hosting
innovative multinationals with
excellent linkages to the research
system—policy leaders would be
well advised to pay special heed
to pressure points relating to
human resources and openness
to global talent. Canada—having
seen its rank on all indices of
the GII fall—is the only country
this year to leave the top 10 in the
GII. Canada’s GII country profile
mirrors the current debate
in that country, where observers
deplore the low levels of support
for R&D in many areas
of the Canadian private sector,
the faltering scientific skills of
the labour force, and a generally
weakening position on innovation
as demonstrated by its 22nd
rank on the Knowledge and
technology outputs pillar.
7. BRICs need to renew their
innovation drivers to live up
to their expected potential.
The BRIC countries (Brazil,
the Russian Federation, India,
and China) have been seen as
drivers of the global economic
engine since 2008 and the slowdown
in high-income economies.
But these countries too are
slowing down, and despite their
unrealized potential, they need
to continue to invest in building
their innovation infrastructures.
China and India come in
at 1st and 2nd place, respectively,
in the Innovation Efficiency
Index rankings, demonstrating a
great ability to translate pockets
of excellence in their innovation
infrastructures into valuable
innovation outputs. China’s performance
on the key Knowledge
and technology outputs pillar
is impressive—the country is
outpaced only by Switzerland,
Sweden, Singapore, and Finland.
However, both of these countries
have weaknesses in their
innovation infrastructures—for
example, ICT is poor in China
and Human capital and research
needs improvement in India—
that must be addressed if these
countries wish to resume higher
levels of growth and innovation.
Brazil has suffered the largest
drop among the BRICs. This
drop demonstrates the importance
of addressing structural
weaknesses in innovation ecosystems
in the face of a global
slowdown in growth. The country
profiles reveal important differences
across the four BRIC
countries, but they all have in
common governance and institutional
challenges that need to
be addressed if they wish to live
up to their expected innovation
potentials.
8. Measuring innovation is a moving
target. Based on discussions
with innovation experts
and inputs from the Advisory
Board and Knowledge Partners,
the GII model is revised every
year in a transparent exercise to
improve the way innovation is
measured. This year, for example,
the Infrastructure pillar was reorganized
to single out ecological
sustainability in a new sub-pillar.
In addition, a new sub-pillar on
online creativity was added to
the Creative outputs pillar. Such
evolution will continue over the
years as new metrics that provide
better and more accurate measures
of innovation, capabilities,
and impact become available. The
GII is not meant to be the definitive
ranking of economies with
respect to innovation. The GII is
more concerned with improving
the ‘journey’ to better measuring
and understanding innovation;
and with identifying targeted
policies, good practices, and other
levers to foster innovation.
The GII model does not capture
all dimensions of innovation across
continents. In GII 2011, we stated:
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THE GLOBAL INNOVATION INDEX 2012 1: The Global Innovation Index 2012