METHODOLOGICAL DEBATE ON THE ‘REGIONAL INNOVATION SCOREBOARD’.
METHODOLOGICAL DEBATE ON THE ‘REGIONAL INNOVATION SCOREBOARD’.
“Bottle- necks” in the RIS
Indeed, from the point of view of the index, it is indifferent which of them has a high or low lev- el. However, as suggested by Ács et al. (2014), it does not seem reasonable to assume, for example, that education can be substituted with a higher level of venture capital. Assuming that all indicators in the RIS repre- sent relevant aspects of the innovation system, the fact that one of them shows particularly low values compared to the other indicators may be a manifestation of “bottlenecks” in the system. The bottlenecks logic is based on the weakest link theory (Harrison and Hirshleifer, 1989) and the theory of constraints (Tol and Yohe, 2007). These theories argue that the performance of any dynamic system is char- acterised by interdependencies and feedback loops, as is the case of innovation systems, and that this overall performance depends on the element with the lowest value in the sys- tem structure. According to these theories, any system can only improve to the extent that the weakest link (i.e. the bottleneck that limits the performance of the entire system) is bolstered. Following the approach of Tarabusi and Palazzi (2004) and Ács et al. (2014), we will calculate a synthetic index that penalises the existence of bottlenecks. The i-th component of the j region after the penalisation will be defined by the following equation: ℎ !" = 𝑚𝑚𝑚𝑚𝑚𝑚 𝑦𝑦 ∙ ! + 1 − 𝑒𝑒 ! ! !" ! !"# ! ∙ ! (1) Since the normalised RIS indicators comprise values in the interval [0,1], the maximum penali- sation will occur when {.� }=0 and and��=1 , at the same time. According to the equation (1), in this case h��=0.63 . The maximum possible penalisation would therefore be 37%, reducing our best indicator to 63% of its value.
The last methodo- logical discussion we will address in this paper is the RIS's ability to identify “bottle- necks” in the op - eration of the re- gional innovation system. Underly- ing this debate is the assumption, which underpins all synthetic in- dices, that there is perfect substi- tutability between the factors in the index. In other words, if we have two indicators in a synthetic index, the situation in which one of them is high and the other low is equiv- alent to them both having an average value.
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