Regional Innovation Index: Regional champions within national Innovation Systems

Abstract

We look at the most innovative regions in Europe with the aim of detecting and describing the distinguished features of their innovation profiles, and to reach a workable synthesis of such a multi-faceted phenomenon called innovation. Composite indicators seem to be the natural candidates for this job as they ideally measure multi-dimensional concepts which cannot be captured by a single variable. In the first part of the report we carry out a robustness testing and the sensitivity analysis of the computed composite indicator. The report examines a large basket of possible meaningful alternatives and tests robustness as well as sensitivity both in a deterministic as well as in a probabilistic setting. In the second part of the report, written by one of the authors, we look at composites from the point of view of the policymaking process. Policy-makers in Europe are re-framing policy goals within the Europe 2020 strategy. The attention on innovation is moving from the simple ‘fostering innovation’ objectives, towards the more complex and interdependent goals of ‘gaining value from knowledge’. The declination of this new attention has been on entrepreneurship and human capital instead of simply raising R&D expenditures and patent applications