National Innovation Development Index: A Cross-country Comparison of Innovation Development Performance

Innovation development has received increasingly more attention from academia and policymakers. The policy-making for promoting it heavily relies on evidence provided by measuring national innovation development. This study tries to build a bridge between innovation development measurement and policy-making. The literature shows that there is very limited theoretical and methodological research on measuring national innovation development. This paper proposes a national innovation development index(NIDI) for measuring the performance of national innovation development by integrating the definition of innovation from five perspectives and the definition of development from four perspectives. The NIDI consists of five sub-indexes, science and technology development sub-index, innovation condition development sub-index, industrial innovation development sub-index, social innovation development sub-index, and green & low-carbon development sub-index, which is measured by the composite sub-index approach. This paper uses the NIDI methodology to investigate 40 countries based on the panel data from 2006 to 2015, which helps classify countries into three categories including leading, advanced and catching-up countries. The cross-analysis between sub-indexes of the NIDI brings new insights into the competitive advantage and disadvantage, which helps governments to choose more specific policies to overcome shortcomings resulted in the poor performance of sub-indexes of the NIDI so as to improve their innovation development performance systematically. Besides, the findings in this article indicate that the level of economic development in a country is to a large extent determined by the level of national innovation development.