Track: Innovation

Abstract

Innovation is becoming more and more a decisive engine of development and economic growth. It impacts the economy on different activity scales: (i) at the micro scale (internal business innovation, business creation), (ii) at the meso scales (development of new activities) and (iii) at the macro scales (employment and growth). Aware of that, policy makers, all over the world, emphasize innovation as a key driver of prosperity and progress in their countries.

The purpose of this study is to help identify features that can explain variations in the intensity of innovation between countries. To better understand national innovative capacities, this study proposes identifying distinct groups (or clusters) of countries using their innovation performances. So, available innovation data is used to classify countries with common characteristics into meaningful clusters. Then, these clusters are analyzed and new information that explains the variation of innovation performance between countries is extracted.

To this aim, data representing 121 countries and 49 indicators are investigated over a period of 5 years. Unsupervised and supervised data analysis models are applied using the 2015-2019 GII data. This analysis allows the classification of countries and the clustering of those progressing in the same way in terms of innovation. Therefore, 4 major clusters of countries are defined.

Another important outcome of this study is the identification of key innovation determinants, or key indicators, with superior effect on innovation outcomes. The analysis emphasizes distinctly the “University/Industry research collaboration” and “Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) use” as the two most important indicators enhancing national innovation performances. Four cases studies are also illustrated in this study representing the four innovation clusters, namely for the USA, Morocco, China, and Brazil.

This study’s results can assist countries in planning their mid-term innovation strategies by providing: (i) a reduced number of relevant determinants to improve, and (ii) a focused set of prospective countries for potential benchmarking either intra- or inter-cluster.