Research consortium pushes ahead on developing provincial innovation indicators

A recently formed research consortium is working to expand an evolving set of indicators that will allow the tracking of innovation at the provincial level. The Canadian Science and Innovation Indicators Consortium (CSIIC) is in the initial stages of developing the new indicators, basing their research on work already conducted by the European Commission.

The need for better indicators arose when Industry Canada began requesting such data to support its innovation strategy, launched last year. It engaged the Conference Board of Canada (CBOC) to produce a report that included innovation indicators and is slated to deliver the final product this month.

The CSIIC has been assisting CBOC in developing national indicators that will allow the government to measure its progress toward meeting the ambitious goals and targets objectives laid out in last year’s national innovation summit. But the development of provincial indicators is considered a logical next step towards a comprehensive set of innovation indicators.

“We have some indicators for the national level but when we try to assess the provinces there are very few available,” says Dr Benoit Godin, head of the CSIIC and a senior researcher at the Institut national de la recherche scientifique (INRS) in Montreal. “We want to reproduce the first cut of indicators produced for the European Innovation Scoreboard for Canada and then for the provinces. This would allow the provinces and the country to benchmark against the Europeans.”

CSIIC members acknowledge, however, that even achieving these objectives is merely the beginning of a shift towards the development of innovation indicators and away from traditional science and technology (S&T) indicators currently in use through the industrialized world. The objective is to develop a whole new cohort of innovation indicators that would supplement the traditional R&D indicators such as GERD (Gross Expenditures on R&D), BERD (business), GBOARD (government), and HERD (higher education).

“We will work with the indicators of the European Commission to see if they are accurate or not. Indicators in the social sciences sense of the word are still pretty crude,” says Dr Sylvan Katz, a CSIIC member, a research fellow at the Science Policy Research Unit at the Univ of Sussex at Brighton in the UK and a Saskatoon-based consultant. “I’m really excited by the opportunities but we have to gain momentum. We need provincial-level indicators.”

The European Innovation Scoreboard (EIS) complements the Enterprise Policy Scoreboard and other benchmarking exercises of the European Commission. It contains a series of indicators, intended to summarize the main drivers and outputs of innovation. They are divided into four groups: human resources for innovation; the creation of new knowledge; transmission and application of knowledge; and innovation finance, outputs and markets (see chart).

Katz cautions that the indicators currently being developed may be based on weak foundations. He is currently working to make the indicators more robust by developing models of the European and the Canadian innovation systems based on the scale-independent relationship between Gross Expenditures on R&D and Gross Domestic Product.

Most recent indicator-development projects have been frustrated by the lack of standard measures of innovation beyond the traditional R&D statistics. The Conference Board project was forced to rely on existing indicators in its initial work. In future it will ask for leeway to develop more original indicators. CSIIC’s mandate is to develop new quantitative indicators of innovation that can be used in future studies.

CSIIC members recently met in Kananaskis and Calgary to map out the kind of indicators required to break dependency on off-the-shelf indicators of limited value. It was the first non-government forum in many years to examine needs and opportunities for new indicators. Members also took stock of other activities at the provincial level.

In Ontario, the Ontario Science and Innovation Council last year published an indicators study (Ontario Innovation Index 2002), while the Quebec government has its own system of indicators (Tableau de bord du systeme d’innovation québécois, 2003). And the Alberta government is currently working on a similar study with the Calgary-based Centre for Innovation Studies (CIS).

“Innovation is still a fuzzy concept and we continue to measure inputs and not outputs,” says Godin. “We’re putting all this work in a coherent framework in order to get the resources to move this further. We’re in touch with different institutions and government departments.

R$