METHODOLOGICAL DEBATE ON THE ‘REGIONAL INNOVATION SCOREBOARD’.
METHODOLOGICAL DEBATE ON THE ‘REGIONAL INNOVATION SCOREBOARD’.
The rest of the document is structured as fol- lows. Chapter 2 provides an overview of some of the most representative methodological debates around synthetic indices, and presents the three perspectives addressed in this paper. Chapter 3 frames the Spanish situation within the context of European countries, based on the data provided by the EIS at national level. Chapter 4 analyses the robustness of the RIS ranking for European regions in the event of variations in the specific weights of the indica - tors in the RIS index, firstly noting its stability, and secondly offering a robust indicator for it. This robust RIS indicator provides a measure- ment of the “significance” of the differences between the indices of the European regions by assigning different weights to the RIS in- dicators. Chapter 5 analyses the efficiency of innovation activity for the European regions as a whole, identifying those factors which explain the inefficiency of regional innovation systems from an input or output perspective. Chapter 6 focuses on analysing the bottlenecks that constrain the performance of the whole in- novation system. This analysis has relevant implications for public action, since, by iden- tifying the factors that limit the performance of the entire system, it provides clear direction for innovation policy administrators in each territory. Far from being partial, these policies would focus on those system elements that require most support, since their effects would generate positive network externalities for the entire system. In other words, while chapter 5 offers policy-makers decisions to make their respective innovation systems perform more efficiently, the conclusions set out in chapter 6 focus on making these systems more effec- tive. Finally, the main conclusions are set out in chapter 7, identifying the main areas of public intervention required in order to improve per- formance for each regional innovation system in Spain.
that we will reach a point in time when we have a “complete” number of indicators available to provide the final characterisation of an inno - vation system. As a scientific community, we therefore find ourselves in a context in which we must make the most of the indicators available today. This implies that we must put on as many sets of “glasses” as possible to interpret a single reality (measured through the indicators we have at this moment) from different perspectives (Filippetti and Peyrache, 2011). Each set of “glasses” represents a meth - odological approach with a particular view of a multidimensional reality. Existing research in this regard shows that, depending on the perspectives (i.e. “glasses”) used, the overview of performance of an innovation system can vary significantly (Zabala-Iturriagagoitia et al. , 2007a, 2007b, 2008; Edquist et al. , 2018; Barbero et al. , 2021). Having a comprehen - sive understanding of an innovation system, its challenges, problems and needs therefore requires us to use as many “glasses” as possi- ble and combine the conclusions drawn from them, ready to feed the definition of policies. The aim of this report is to analyse perfor- mance of Spain’s regional innovation systems through a range of perspectives (“glasses”), giving an overview of its relative position in Europe in order to define the innovation pol - icies to be implemented. To this end, we will address three perspectives of analysis, all of them based on the data provided by the 2021 edition of RIS for all European regions: (I) change in relative weights of each indicator to be included in the synthetic index; (II ) efficiency of the innovation activity, considering the ratio between inputs and outputs; and (III) analysis of bottlenecks hindering overall system perfor- mance. These three perspectives have been applied to the 225 European regions reporting all the indicators in the RIS for 2021, and their results have been compared with the official results published by the European Commission in its RIS ranking 3 .
Measuring innova- tion at territorial level is one of the most relevant chal- lenges in the field of innovation poli- cy.
The aim of this re- port is to analyse the performance of Spain’s innovation system from three different perspec- tives
3 The fifteen European regions excluded from the analysis due to missing data include two Spanish regions (the autonomous cities of Ceuta and Melilla).
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