Monitoring national innovation performance: going beyond standardized rankings

Abstract

Innovation performance has become increasingly important for governments as they search for ways to stimulate the economy and to address pressing societal challenges. Thus, in recent years a variety of innovation performance rankings have been developed to measure performance levels and benchmark them against other countries. Those are, hence, closely watched by policymakers and are frequently perceived as a neutral gauge of a country’s innovation performance. Grupp and Schubert (2010) have pointed out that different weighting schemes can give rise to very different country rankings. They recommend complementing composite indicators by multidimensional representations of the issues leading to the performance in the aggregate indicator, i.e. explaining to policy makers why the performance arises. In this article, we sketch such a multidimensional framework.