In June, the National Science Foundation held a workshop on Advancing Measures of Innovation: Knowledge Flows, Business Metrics, and Measurement Strategies:
The workshop was held in the context of the American Competitiveness Initiative, the Science of Science Policy (SoSP) initiative led by NSF and involving other federal agencies, and OECD's decadal "Blue Sky II" effort to develop new and better indicators of science, technology, and innovation.
Presentations from the workshop are now available on their website and I understand that the full papers will be available later as a special issue of The Journal Technology Transfer.
There is a lot of good information and insight in these presentations. I was especially taken with the conclusions of Rajesh Chandy, University of Minnesota presentation on Innovation: Business Metrics:
• Innovation
– What is it?
• Not what we typically measure
– Who does it?
• Not whom we typically assume
– How is it done?
• Not how we implicitly believe
– Who gains most from it?
• Not who we often think
Answering those questions and confronting those misunderstandings would be an excellent starting point for crafting a real innovation policy for the US.
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