ThinkThank

World Innovation

The fight against wealth gaps in the world.

GLOBAL INNOVATION

The fight against wealth gaps in the world.

THINK TANK WORLD INNOVATION Who are we ?

World Innovation Think thanks for human development around the world. Think, Produce and disseminate innovative solutions throughout the world. We support entrepreneurs who want to change the world and we work for inclusive growth. Innovation is important for driving economic progress and competitiveness – both for developed and developing economies. It is essential to place innovation at the center of the inclusive growth strategy. Many governments place innovation at the center of their growth strategies. With this in mind, measuring innovation and providing a rigorous statistical benchmark that attempts to capture national innovation ecosystems is at the heart of the World Innovation team. Our actions

What is WIPO?

Think-Thank Foundation Is Working In Following Areas:-

The search for global innovation
The fight against wealth gaps in the world.
Study on global governance
Optimization of business models of companies

Strategies for Global Innovation Management

Successful global innovation management requires some core strategies which are discussed below:-

1. Creating conversations

Innovation is never effective in isolation. Involving every employee is crucial to making the culture of innovation efficacious. Bringing people together stirs a better chance of success in organizations. One of the best techniques to do so is crowdsourcing.

2. Pulling employees

Organizations must nurture the internal side of open innovation to amplify participation. There should be no mandating or forcing of involvement in the same. That is because it may lead to frailties later. Organizations can involve the employees in ideation and let them know how that can lead to its success.

3. Run awareness campaigns

Creating innovative ideas requires strategic orientation. That helps to generate new ideas and also adopt the culture. A proven way to do so is by running awareness campaigns within the organization. This is how to encourage the broadest range of participants in an organization.

4. Introducing a common space

Employees do not always get a separate time or space to discuss ideas. What’s better than introducing a common space for them within the organization! That helps them coordinate better and discuss various ideas and strategies to uphold the organization’s success.

5. Transparency

The culture of innovation receives a boost through transparency. The employees must be aware of the ideas, challenges, and future strategies discussed within the organization. That will help them prioritize the required tasks and recommend ideas for the same.

Importance of Global Innovation Management

The activity of crowdsourcing innovation has made its debut in the digital workspace with high expectations. This practice encourages the active participation of team members to pool up ideas within the organization. It also acts as a channel to obtain an effective and appropriate solution for complex business challenges.

When organizations around the world build a culture of innovation, it drives sustainable and productive practices that spark more ideas. These ideas work wonders in workspaces or organizations to stay ahead and remain competitive in the long haul.

Pooling innovation helps produce new products and services, enhance an organization’s success, improve the development process, and introduce cost-reducing techniques. This sums up the importance of global innovation management across organizations.

How is the Global Innovation Index calculated?

The GII is calculated by taking a simple average of the scores in two sub-indices. The sub-indices are:

  1. Innovation Input Index (composed of five pillars)
  2. Innovation Output Index (composed of two pillars)

Both the pillars describe an attribute of innovation each and contain up to five indicators. Their score is computed by the weighted average method. 

GII and India

As seen from the table above, India is the top country in its group, which is Central and Southern Asia. 

  • India is ranked 40th, six places above the previous year’s rank.
  • This is for the first time that India is ranked within 40th in the GII.
  • India is now the first innovative lower-middle-income economy in the world.
  • India ranks in the top 15 in the following indicators:
    • Government online services
    • ICT services export
    • Graduates in science and engineering
    • R&D-intensive global companies
  • The report states that India has the highest innovation quality among lower-middle-income countries.
  • The consistent improvement in the index rankings is owing to the immense knowledge capital, the vibrant startup ecosystem, and the amazing work done by the public and private research organizations.
  • India improved the most in three pillars: Institutions (61st), business sophistication (55th), and creative outputs (64th).
  • The India Innovation Index 2019 which was released by the National Institution for Transforming India NITI Aayog, has been widely accepted as the major step in the direction of decentralization of innovation across all the states of India.

The state of global innovation

Figure 1

Figure 2

GII 2022 shows that research and development (R&D) and other investments, which drive innovation, continued to surge in 2021 despite the COVID-19 pandemic.

Technology firms are at the core of GDP contributions for most developed and developing nations.  They are now – and will continue to be – essential to the global economy. As a result, governments will continue to rely on innovation by technology firms, for future economic growth, and venture firms will continue to invest in technology firms with high growth potential, contributing capital to those jurisdictions that best support such innovation.

However, these figures mask large differences at the industry level. Figure 1 presents annual R&D expenditures, revenues and R&D intensities for the seven industries with the greatest cumulative R&D investment in 2021. Similar to last year, the increase in R&D expenditures between 2018 and 2021 is primarily driven by four industries, ICT hardware and electrical equipment; pharmaceuticals and biotechnology; software and ICT services; and construction and industrial metals. 

What determines the rankings?

GII rankings are based on the following seven pillars, split into the following Innovation Input and Output Indexes. The economies are then scored based on the overall aggregated associated scores on each of them:

Innovation Inputs:

  • Institutions/ Filmographic details
  • Human and Capital Research
  • Infrastructure
  • Market Sophistication
  • Business Sophistication

Innovation Outputs:

  • Knowledge and Technology Outputs
  • Creative Outputs
  • Technology Clusters

About the Global Innovation Index–GII:

  • It is published by by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), in partnership with the Portulans Institute and with the support of its corporate partners including the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), the Brazilian National Confederation of Industry (CNI), Ecopetrol (Colombia), and the Turkish Exporters Assembly (TIM).
  • The GII aims to capture the multi-dimensional facets of innovation ranking and rich analysis referencing around 132 economies.
  • Indicators: The index ranks world economies according to their innovation capabilities and consists of roughly 80 indicators grouped into innovation inputs and outputs.

Highlights of the Global Innovation Index 2022

What is the future of innovation-driven growth?

The 2022 edition of the GII tracks the most recent global innovation trends against the background of an ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, slowing productivity growth and other evolving challenges. This edition’s thematic focus on the future of innovation-driven growth provides a perspective on whether stagnation and low productivity growth are here to stay, or whether we are about to enter a new era, where new innovation spurts – the Digital Age and the Deep Science Innovation waves – bring about an economic uplift.

Ministers and Heads of States made special addresses at the launch event, while investors, business leaders, renowned scientists and academics, and representatives from prominent organizations participated in two panel discussions.

Problem with the Global Innovation Index

INSEAD Business School, along with Cornell University and the World Intellectual Property Organisation have just released their analysis of the world’s most innovative countries for 2016.

Together, this is called the Global Innovation Index and aims to objectively measure several dozen indicators to assess which countries are comparatively more innovative than others.

You may have seen graphics being forwarded around Linkedin, with a chart displaying the top rankings of “most innovative countries 2016” next to a cross-section of random index numbers, declaring that once again Switzerland is the most innovative country in the world.

First of all, I want to congratulate these institutions and the hundreds of collaborators who work on not only the report, but also compiling the thousands of data points to make the comparative analysis possible.

For innovation professionals like myself, this data trove is a goldmine for uncovering trends which are happening across the world, especially as you can compare current data to previous years to find both local and global trends. The full report (which you can download for free at the above link) is over 451 pages long and has a substantial level of detail, for each country and also each index they use to form the total. Here you can see how the top 10 countries’ positions have changed over the past 4 years, and how Switzerland has remained steady at the top.

The analysis itself is also often top-notch, with top economists sifting through both the micro-economic and macro-economic data to find the underlying trends. For example, the trend for the 2016 report was “Winning with Global Innovation”, and it showed how R&D is becoming more open and geographically diverse.

However, as you may have guessed from the title, I have one major concern with the foundation of the index which results in me taking its findings (like all other reports I analyse) with a grain of salt:

“In order to stay unbiased and objective in producing this index, the analysts rely on a series of available numerical datasets available to compare countries. This limited availability means that the analysts need to choose which ones represent the “innovativeness” of a country, and it is here that in my opinion the analysts have put too much emphasis on macroeconomic and socio-political data-points, and too little on data points which actually relate to achieveing innovation.”

The problem with extrapolating data

I spent 8 years as a management consultant, and a number of my projects were referred to as “Strategy Consulting”. Here, we would be asked to make predictions for a specific topic, such as the likely growth rates for an industry segment based on trends.

In order to make such an assessment, you need two primary things:

  • Baseline and historical data points to identify what the data is telling you (e.g. comparative benchmarks, industry analysis)
  • Insight into what the data is telling you, and how external future forces and current trends may affect the industry (scenarios such as disruptive new technology, price drops or changes in consumer behaviour)

The issue arises in that part 1 is quite impartial, unbiased and objective, as it is primarily numerical and based on current available data. However, part 2 is where humans like me get their grubby hands on these numbers and start using intelligence and insight to create future “scenarios” which may or may not be true. These scenarios are therefore more subjective, and will vary based on the people who provided the insight, and the thought processes and intelligence of those people. This is why consultants are paid so much. The more evidence that is available to back up the insights, the lower the risk that they could be wrong, but they will never be 100% guaranteed.

The indicators used by the Report are divided into sub-categories (with numerous other sub-indicators) as follows:
  1. Innovation Inputs
    • Institutions
    • Human Capital and Research
    • Infrastructure
    • Market Sophistication
    • Business Sophistication

  2. Innovation Outputs
    • Knowledge and Technology Outputs
    • Creative Outputs