National Innovation Development Index: A Cross-country Comparison of Innovation Development Performance

Innovation development has received increasingly more attention from academia and policymakers. The policy-making for promoting it heavily relies on evidence provided by measuring national innovation development. This study tries to build a bridge between innovation development measurement and policy-making. The literature shows that there is very limited theoretical and methodological research on measuring national innovation development. This paper proposes a national innovation development index(NIDI) for measuring the performance of national innovation development by integrating the definition of innovation from five perspectives and the definition of development from four perspectives. The NIDI consists of five sub-indexes, science and technology development sub-index, innovation condition development sub-index, industrial innovation development sub-index, social innovation development sub-index, and green & low-carbon development sub-index, which is measured by the composite sub-index approach. This paper uses the NIDI methodology to investigate 40 countries based on the panel data from 2006 to 2015, which helps classify countries into three categories including leading, advanced and catching-up countries. The cross-analysis between sub-indexes of the NIDI brings new insights into the competitive advantage and disadvantage, which helps governments to choose more specific policies to overcome shortcomings resulted in the poor performance of sub-indexes of the NIDI so as to improve their innovation development performance systematically. Besides, the findings in this article indicate that the level of economic development in a country is to a large extent determined by the level of national innovation development.

National Innovation Capacity Index: A Cross-Country Comparative Analysis

The national innovation capacity(NIC) has received increasingly more attention from academia and policy makers. This study develops a methodology for measuring NIC with a view to provide the evidence for policy-making concerning national innovation capacity-building, and conducts a crosscountry comparison based on the panel data of 2006-2015.(1) National innovation capacity index(NICI) is established to measure the performance of NIC from two perspectives, namely national innovation strength index(NISI) and national innovation effectiveness index(NIEI).(2) Developed countries usually perform better than developing countries in terms of the NICI if there is no huge gap in economic scale between two kinds of countries.(3) Emerging countries show greater imbalance between the NISI and the NIEI, and have generally higher average annual growth rate of the NISI and the NIEI than that of developed countries.(4) National innovation strength is closely related to national economic scale while national innovation effectiveness is closely related to national development level. Some theoretical considerations in this research may make contributions to innovation development studies.(1) NIC is regarded as the capacity for scientific discovery and technology invention, and for driving economic, social and environmental development, which emphasizes the driving effect and the influence of innovation on development.(2) The concepts such as the NISI and the NIEI are introduced to measure the NIC so as to distinguish the contribution of the size of innovation activities to the NIC and the contribution of the efficiency and efficacy of innovation-driven development to the NIC.(3) The indicator system of the NICI is designed from the perspective of the full spectrum of capacity-building process ranging from input to output by introducing the "innovation condition" as a broad sense "innovation input" and the "innovation outcome" as a broad sense "innovation output".