METHODOLOGICAL DEBATE ON THE ‘REGIONAL INNOVATION SCOREBOARD’.
METHODOLOGICAL DEBATE ON THE ‘REGIONAL INNOVATION SCOREBOARD’.
The report develops three new perspectives to supplement the one already provided by the European Commission itself through its RIS index. Thanks to these new perspectives, the report provides a new ranking for European regions as a whole in terms of innovation. The first of these new perspectives consists of changing the relative weights attributed each indicator in the final synthetic index. In the RIS index, the European Commission attributes the same specific weight to all indicators (i.e. the arithmetic mean), which implicitly reflects the fact that the relative importance of the func- tions that characterise an innovation system remains the same, regardless of the territory. Assigning different relative weights to each indicator in the synthetic index will hopefully obtain a measurement of the degree of robust- ness offered by the RIS index, and, therefore, the robustness of the ranking offered by the European Commission in relation to the inno- vation performance of European regions. Are significant variations observed in the ranking of Spanish regions when different relative weights are assigned to the indicators in the RIS? report. This ranking is obtained by considering the number of European regions that have a significantly higher RIS index than that of a given region. A significant improvement in the performance of the regional innovation systems in Spain can be observed in all cases when comparing the ranking offered by the European Commission for each of the Spanish regions with the robust ranking estimated here. However, even with this robust ranking, most regions continue to occupy intermediate or low positions within Europe, thus demonstrating that the systems in place in most regions have low innovation capacity and therefore require public policies for improvement. However, such A robust RIS ranking is provided from the first of the perspectives considered in this policies should not focus solely on increas- ing the resources allocated to the innovation system, but also on improving its performance and operation in terms of producing innovation results.The second perspective involves ana -
The third of the perspectives developed in the report focuses on analysing identifying “bot- tlenecks” that hinder the overall functioning of the regional innovation system. According to this perspective, any system can only improve to the extent that its weakest link is reinforced. Hence, while prior efficiency analysis aims to offer public administrators decisions that would make their respective innovation sys- tems perform more efficiently, the results of the bottleneck analysis focus on making these systems perform more effectively. After iden - tifying the main bottleneck for each region, we calculated a new synthetic index that corrects the performance level of each territory, based on the penalisation caused by this bottleneck. What are the main bottlenecks hindering the overall performance of the Spanish regions? And to what extent would system performance improve if such bottlenecks were improved? The results of this third analysis show that the main bottlenecks for the Spanish regions are low business investment in R&D, lack of inter- action in the system, and low technological innovation production capacity (both in terms of processes and products) in the SME s. These results are in line with those obtained in the efficiency perspective, since they point to the fact that any improvements in the performance of innovation systems in Spain must go hand- in-hand with both better use of inputs and also an improvement in the quantity of results in terms of innovation outputs.
lysing regional innovation system efficiency in converting investment in supporting the devel- opment of innovating activity (i.e. inputs) into innovation results (i.e. outputs). According to the methodological structure of the RIS index, the RIS index will grow whenever a territory increases the inputs dedicated to the innova- tion system while the outputs remain constant (i.e. the arithmetic mean of inputs and outputs grows), therefore improving this territory’s ranking. However, from a public administrator's point of view, it is not rational to assume that an innovation system will perform better by simply increasing the number of inputs without an equivalent rise in outputs. We apply non-par - ametric methodologies such as Data Envelop- ment Analysis to construct a measurement of the efficiency of regional innovation systems in Europe. To what extent do the Spanish regions behave efficiently or inefficiently? And what are the reasons for any inefficient performance? This efficiency approach has shown that there is a group of Spanish regions with high per- formance (Balearic Islands, La Rioja, Valencia Region, Catalonia and Murcia Region), another group with intermediate performance (Aragon, Madrid Region, Cantabria, Castile-La Mancha and Extremadura), and another group with low performance (Asturias, Andalusia, Galicia, Basque Country, Navarre, and Castile-León). Apart from obtaining an efficiency-based rank - ing of European regions, the analysis is also useful in identifying the main sources of inef- ficiency for each regional innovation system. This inefficiency can be due to either an excess of inputs or a shortage of outputs. In terms of inputs, the analysis shows a low return on inno- vation expenditure in most Spanish regions. As for outputs, the analysis shows that efficient regions with a similar input level to the Spanish regions obtain a significantly higher output, es - pecially when it comes to producing industrial designs and product and process innovations.
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Indicators in the RIS to measure the innovation perfor- mance of European regions
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New perspectives to analyse region- al innovation systems
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