Conferencia Prof. Jon Mikel Zabala
Speaker: Jon Mikel Zabala
Title: “Ranking and Benchmarking Innovation Performance in the EU: Policy Guidelines Based on DEA-TOPSIS Methods”
Date: 12 June. 13:00 h.
Localication: Sala de Seminarios (Edificio Torretamarit)
Abstract. “The Innovation Union Scoreboard (IUS) is a tool to monitor the implementation of and to examine and illustrate the innovation performance of European Member States as well as to evaluate (and rank) their research and innovation systems. A Summary Innovation Index (SII) is provided by the IUS to assess the innovation performance of the member states. The SII is constituted by an average of 25 indicators. The IUS thus measures the innovation performance for each country by summarizing all 25 indicators into a single SII, irrespective of whether the indicators are presenting innovation outputs or innovation inputs. In addition in the SII all indicators are equally weighted. This means that the higher the average value of the 25 indicators, the better the innovation performance is said to be.
The IUS follows a rationale in which “the more is the better”, namely, the higher the values of the 25 indicators that constitute the IUS, the better the innovation performance. The goal of this paper is to examine the IUS, and through the application of a complementary methodology based on efficiency, find out whether the ranking of European countries obtained with each approach are positively related (i.e. complementary) to each other. By doing so, the paper offers a critical review of the SII, and proposes to put more emphasis on the identification of and relation between input and output innovation indicators. We find that the results differ substantially between the SII and the ranking based on our method, with significant consequences for the design of innovation policies”.