Home | Databases | WorldLII | Search | Feedback Edited Legal Collections Data

Jensen, Paul H.; Palangkaraya, Alfons --- "Innovation Scoreboards: An Australian Perspective" [2006] ELECD 352; in Bosworth, Derek; Webster, Elizabeth (eds), "The Management of Intellectual Property" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2006)

Book Title: The Management of Intellectual Property

Editor(s): Bosworth, Derek; Webster, Elizabeth

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781845421120

Section: Chapter 9

Section Title: Innovation Scoreboards: An Australian Perspective

Author(s): Jensen, Paul H.; Palangkaraya, Alfons

Number of pages: 18

Extract:

9. Innovation scoreboards:
an Australian perspective
Paul H. Jensen and Alfons Palangkaraya

1 INTRODUCTION

Innovation is generally recognized by economists as the ultimate engine
of growth and prosperity. As Gans and Stern (2003, p. 7) state: `World
class competitiveness and prosperity depends on ... the ability to develop
and commercialise "new-to-the-world" technologies, products and business
organizations.' This insight has spawned burgeoning interest in the analysis
of innovation and its determinants at both the national level and the company
level. While governments are typically interested in aggregate measures of
innovation so that a nation's performance can be benchmarked against
others, it is at the firm level where most of the innovative activity actually
occurs: firms take the risks involved in commercializing the inventions which
ultimately drive the growth of the domestic economy. As a consequence,
measurement of companies' innovative performance has also received a lot
of attention from academics, policy-makers and business analysts.
However, measurement of innovation at either the national or company
level is difficult for a number of reasons. First, an innovation (by its very
definition) is something that is `new', which makes it difficult to construct
a measure of innovation which is general enough to be used to compare to
other innovative outputs. Second, the innovation process typically takes many
years and involves managing numerous risks. As a result, the relationship
between inputs (such as R&D expenditure) and outputs (such as patents) is
potentially non-linear and it is unclear how these factors ...