Entre el ridículo y la alabanza: Medición de la eficiencia en sistemas de innovación vía un indicador único

Innovation is currently seen as a cornerstone not only for economic development but also as an intrinsic human activity that could help to face the great challenges of human kind. Differences on innovation performance across sectors and countries give a variated landscape to the industrial structure and growth rates. Given the importance of innovation in the new European 2020 Strategy, measuring progress but also monitoring what drives innovation becomes crucial for policy development. Following upon this strategy the new European Flag Initiative “Innovation Union” called for a new “single” indicator on innovation. Currently the information infrastructure on Innovation in Europe contains a number of indicators. Most of the current indicators report over innovation inputs and outputs. Data concerning the innovation system (supply side only) are generated by surveying firms where their manager’s self-report diverse information related to the innovative behaviour of their firms. The main instrument to gather this information in Europe is the Community Innovation Survey (CIS). The last five editions of CIS have been a bastion of innovation policy research during the last decade. Despite this, CIS has been criticized for not having an umbrella framework that unifies its different underpinnings to explain what drives innovation to actual innovation and economic outcomes. Recent advances in the fields of psychological economics and the economics of innovation have provided approaches that establish sound causality between drivers of innovation based on behavioural science. In this paper we propose framework that enables the theoretical and empirical linkage between drivers of innovation to innovation performance via the integration of core features determining innovative behaviour in to a single composite. This index enables to assess the total propensity of firms to innovate and assess relative innovation performance at the sector and country level. The approach adopted overcomes long standing theoretical and methodological issues related to the scope, aggregation and validation statistical composites. The empirical demonstration of the index was done using CIS4 data, the results validate the theoretical structure and robustness of the model proposed enabling its replication for innovation policy analysis in different settings.

About Carlos Montalvo

Dr Montalvo (1962) works as Senior Scientist on Industrial and Innovation Policy at TNO. With 23 years of professional experience, he has extensive practice as engineer in project and R&D management and in multidisciplinary and international policy research. Previous to joining TNO he held a number of engineering and management positions in industry and international organisations. His research output gives support to European Commission in several key RTD and innovation actions and policy. Since 2001 he is Subject Editor on innovation and environment for the Journal of Cleaner Production. His work on Behavioural Innovation Economics has been recently recognised as pioneering in the literature of innovation studies. Dr. Montalvo current activities and research interest spread across: evaluation of innovation and RTD policy; sectoral R&D and structural change; innovation and the environment, innovation and regulation, technology adoption and diffusion analyses, and in the application of behavioural dynamic models to explore the interaction between actors influencing innovation and change.