Read the original article: “Building an innovation nation”

Analyses and comparisons between innovation environments never fail to generate quite a bit of both interest and controversy. The interest must be in large part because we all understand how critical innovative capacity is to economic competitiveness and sustainable growth. The controversy, however, often seems to be due to the somewhat imprecise definition of the concept.

I’d like to briefly address the three main issues that have been brought up on the comments to the article.

First, to clarify the question of how we measured innovation output: While number of patents was used to draw the graphic that accompanies the article, it was only one of several ideation proxies used in our analysis and should not be construed as a comprehensive measure of innovation output.

Since we believe there is no single measure that captures all elements of innovation output, we consider a number of output proxies for different stages of the innovation value chain: ideation, implementation, and commercialization. In addition to patents, we also looked at output proxies such as ‘economic value added’, ‘number of journal publications’, ‘change in labor productivity’, etc. By benchmarking a cluster’s performance against its peers in each of these stages, it is possible to identify ‘innovation bottlenecks’ and define areas for improvement.

Second, a couple of comments suggested that our work contradicts the findings of a report by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) that ranked the United States as sixth among forty countries in innovation (as recently reported by the New York Times).

In reality, if we normalize our innovation output proxies by the size of each country’s population or economy – as done by the ITIF – we arrive at very similar findings. We chose to avoid direct comparisons between large heterogeneous countries and small city states, however, and chose instead to look at the ‘metropolitan region’ level whenever possible.

Third, a large number of comments inquired about the location of specific cities on our chart, or requested that we make available the data for the other cities. We appreciate the interest and are currently looking to create have created an interactive version of the exhibit that will let you explore the other cities in the graphic.

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