Some experts figure that for developed countries, innovation is the most important ingredient for assuring that standard of living and quality of life don?t decline, either in real or relative terms, compared with developing countries.
I agree with them and believe that Canada should worry more about this.
Europeans certainly feel this way. To track the innovation performance of the 27 European Union member countries (EU27), they developed the European Innovation Scoreboard. It was subsequently modified to the Innovation Union Scoreboard (IUS) to help monitor the progress toward Europe?s 2020 innovation targets.
The IUS 2010 report (prepared by UNU-MERIT, the Maastricht Economic and social Research and training centre on Innovation and Technology) compiles 25 indicators using statistics from Eurostat and other internationally recognized sources, to improve comparability between countries.
IUS 2010 includes the EU27, as well as Croatia, Iceland, Macedonia, Norway, Serbia, Switzerland and Turkey. It also includes comparisons between the EU27, the U.S., Japan and BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China). Given this long list of countries, I found it astounding that Canada – an original G7 member – didn?t even rate inclusion. Maybe the Europeans don?t consider Canada?s innovation performance to be of any interest. Surprisingly, Korea didn?t rate inclusion either.
The 25 indicators fall into three categories.
?The enablers. These reflect innovation drivers external to enterprises in three dimensions: human resource factors; openness, excellence and attractiveness of research systems, including the international competitiveness of the science base; and finance and support, including availability of finance for innovation and the support of governments for research and innovation.
?Enterprise activities. These track innovation efforts at the business level and reflect three dimensions: business investment – R&D and non-R&D to generate innovations; entrepreneurial efforts, collaboration among innovating firms and with the public sector; and the intellectual assets measured through different forms of intellectual property rights (IPR) as throughputs of innovation.
?Outputs. These capture the effects of innovative enterprises by measuring the number of companies that have introduced innovations internally or into the market and the economic impact of innovation, including economic growth related to employment and exports and sales from innovation.
Within the EU27, member states fall into four groups. Denmark, Finland, Germany and Sweden are ?the innovation leaders,? showing performance well above the EU27 average. Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, Estonia, France, Ireland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Slovenia, and the U.K. – ?the innovation followers? – are close to the average. The Czech Republic, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Malta, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia and Spain are below the average. These countries are ?moderate innovators.? Bulgaria, Latvia, Lithuania and Romania, the ?modest innovators,? are well below the average.
Comparisons with non-EU countries are interesting, though the report?s authors admit to having less data for these countries. Switzerland is Europe?s strongest innovator. It ranks comparably to the performance of the U.S., at about 50% higher that the EU27 average. Japan is a strong innovator, performing 40% higher than this average. The BRIC countries rank poorly, perhaps because they have concerns now other than innovation. Russia comes in at -37%, India -53%, China -55% and Brazil -58% below the EU27 average.
It would be highly useful for Canada to be included in this major global innovation scorecard in the future because we have a lazy tendency to compare Canada only with the U.S. For proof, just look at the Thomson Reuters venture industry stats comparing Canada?s venture capital industry only to the U.S.
When we do this, we typically conclude that because we lag behind the U.S. by so much, we don?t even need a public policy debate on how to crank up our innovation performance. Shame on us. Innovation is too important an issue to ignore. ?
