Measuring Innovation - A Discussion of Innovation Indicators at the National Level

The present analysis, contracted on behalf of the Secretariat of the Swiss Science and Innovation Council, discusses measures of innovation based on three well-known rankings: the Global Innovation Index, the Innovation Union Scorecard, and the Knowledge Economy Index. It examines some basic characteristics of these indexes, including the only partial reflection of the latest developments or of country-specific aspects, the great difficulty of obtaining comparable data, and the lack of information about causal connections between input and output data. Bibliometric data, the number of tertiary degrees by age group, and patent statistics, whose respective limitations are discussed, are among the indicators widely used to create the various indexes. More...