An analysis of international experience on innovation measurement methods at the national level and its application to Vietnam

Abstract

Measuring national innovation capability has been studied over the past two decades. Initially, the most commonly used metrics were in terms of patents, expenditure and human resources for Research and Development (R&D) or number of scientific articles. However, these R&D-related measures do not fully reflect the innovation capability of a country, because not every country has enough potential to invest in R&D. Besides, other conditions such as ICT infrastructure, financial system, institutions and ability to absorb knowledge and technology are also other important measures to assess innovation capability of a country. Efforts to fully measure the innovation capability of countries have been established for the first time in Europe with the publication of the European Innovation Scorecard (EIS) set by the European Commission (EC) since 2001 or the effort of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) in expanding the scope of measuring innovation capability on a global scale with the introduction of the Global Innovation Index (GII) in 2007. Besides, the national innovation capability is the synthesis of the innovation capability of the localities. Therefore, the experience of applying the methodology of the GII to specific local conditions in Colombia and India are lessons for Vietnam to refer to in order to build a comprehensive set of indicators for measuring the innovation capability of localities throughout the country.