Nigeria has slipped down the rungs of the ladder in this year’s Global Innovations Index (GII) by Johnson Cornell University and the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) while smaller countries in the West African sub-region such as Burkina Faso, Kenya, Malawi, Rwanda, and Senegal—stand out for having made important progress.
According to the report, of the total countries covered by the report, Nigeria scored 128 in ranking while in other parameters such as innovation input, innovation output and innovation efficiency, it scored 13, 109 and 28 respectively.
The 2015 index covers 141 economies around the world and uses 81 indicators across a range of themes – focusing on two sub-indices which track innovation input and innovation output.
Innovation input looks at factors including institutions, human capital and research, infrastructure, market sophistication, and business sophistication – while innovation output measures both knowledge and technology outputs and creative outputs.
Of the 141 countries, South Africa ranked as the 60th most innovative country in the world, with an index score of 37.45. This was down from 53rd in 2014.
South Africa was ranked as the second most innovative country in sub-Saharan Africa – below Mauritius, which was ranked 49th.
“In addition to South Africa, some African countries – in particular Burkina Faso, Kenya, Malawi, Rwanda, and Senegal – stand out for having made important progress,” the report said.
The report which covered 32 countries in sub-Saharan Africa noted that in recent years, three sub-Saharan African countries have reached positions in the upper half of the GII rankings: Mauritius has been in the top half since 2011 and is 49th in 2015 (although down from 40th in 2014); South Africa, which has been in the top half of the rankings in all previous editions of the GII, is 60th in 2015 (down from 53rd in 2014); and Seychelles, which was in the top half of the rankings (51st) in 2014, is down to 65th in 2015.
In addition, six other countries from this region are ranked among the top 100: Senegal (84th), Botswana (90th), Kenya (92nd), Rwanda (94th), Mozambique (95th), and Malawi (98th). However, with 31 missing values, Seychelles ranks first in the list of economies with the highest number of missing values. If one removes Seychelles from the top list for this reason, the top regional performers are Mauritius, South Africa, and Senegal, the report added.
The remaining 23 countries in this region, Nigeria included, can be found at the bottom of the rankings (100 or lower); 10 of them have improved since last year. Malawi, Mozambique, Senegal, Rwanda, Kenya, Mali, Burkina Faso, and Uganda—also an innovation outperformer—are among the innovation achievers this year, while Burundi, Niger, Namibia, Angola, Swaziland, Guinea, Togo, Seychelles, Botswana, and Sudan have below-par performances.Countries from this region with the biggest improvement in GII rankings are Malawi and Angola (improving 15 places each), Senegal and Mali (14 each), Mozambique (12), Rwanda (eight), Burkina Faso (seven), and the United Republic of Tanzania (six).
Nearly 50 per cent of the countries with the highest number of missing values (20 or more) are from this region. Because the GII does not impute values for missing data, including missing values can have a positive impact on some economies’ overall rankings. If only those countries with data coverage of 75 per cent or higher were assessed, Seychelles would lose its second place ranking (it ties for the highest number of missing values), as would Rwanda (95th, data coverage of 72 per cent) and Malawi (98th, data coverage of 71 per cent), which now rank ninth and ninth in the region, respectively.
This would make Senegal number three in the region, and bring in Namibia as 8th, Ghana as 9th, and Uganda as 10th. Conversely, two countries from this region should be commended for having over 90 per cent data coverage: South Africa and Kenya.
‘In particular, the top 25 countries in the GII consistently score well in most indicators and have strengths in areas such as information communication technologies and business sophistication, which includes knowledge workers’
According to an article titled: ‘The Global Innovation Index 2015: Effective Innovation Policies for Development’, co-authored by Soumitra Dutta, Rafael Escalona Reynoso, and Alexandra L. Bernard from Cornell University; Bruno Lanvin from INSEAD; and Sacha Wunsch-Vincent from WIPO, noted that the idea that innovation-driven growth is no longer the prerogative of high-income countries alone, while providing tangible examples of effective innovation policies undertaken by developing countries with corresponding positive results in the GII rankings. Furthermore, this chapter discusses the results of this year’s rankings.
According to the authors, Switzerland, the United Kingdom (UK), Sweden, the Netherlands, and the United States of America (USA) are the world’s five most-innovative nations; at the same time, China, Malaysia, VietNam, India, Jordan, Kenya, Uganda, and a group of other countries are outpacing their economic peers this year.
They said GII leaders have created well-linked innovation ecosystems where investments in human capital, combined with strong innovation infrastructures, contribute to high levels of creativity. “In particular, the top 25 countries in the GII consistently score well in most indicators and have strengths in areas such as information communication technologies and business sophistication, which includes knowledge workers, innovation linkages, and knowledge absorption; they also create high levels of measurable outputs including creative goods and services.
“But innovation is not only about volume: Quality counts, too. In terms of innovation quality—as measured by university performance, the reach of scholarly articles, and the international dimension of patent applications—the USA holds the top place within the high-income group, followed by the UK, Japan, Germany, and Switzerland,” the authors said.
Top- scoring middle-income economies are narrowing the gap on innovation quality: China leads this group, followed by Brazil and India, fuelled by an improvement in the quality of higher-education institutions.
The GII 2015 confirms the persistence of global innovation divides. Among the top 10 and top 25, rankings have changed but the set of economies remains unaltered (the only exceptions being the Czech Republic, which has made its way into the top 25, and Malta, which has dropped from this list).
For the purposes of this report, economies that perform at least 10 per cent better than their peers for their level of gross domestic product (GDP) are called ‘innovation achievers’.
The 14 middle-income countries outperforming others in their income group—in order of performance—are the Republic of Moldova, China, Viet Nam, Armenia, Senegal, Mongolia, Malaysia, Montenegro, Ukraine, India, Bulgaria, Thailand, Morocco, and Jordan. The eight low-income countries outperforming others in their income group are Malawi, Mozambique, Rwanda, Kenya, Mali, Burkina Faso, Cambodia, and Uganda.
These innovation achievers demonstrate rising levels of innovation input and output results because of improvements made to institutional frameworks, a skilled labour force with expanded tertiary education, better innovation infrastructures, a deeper integration with global credit investment and trade markets, and a sophisticated business community—even if progress on these dimensions is not uniform across their economies.
According to the authors, on average, the technology gap between developing and developed countries is narrowing. One explanation for this phenomenon is that more and more developing countries outperform in innovation inputs and outputs relative to their level of development.
The GII 2015 studied these ‘outperformers’—namely Armenia, China, Georgia, India, Jordan, Kenya, Malaysia, the Republic of Moldova, Mongolia, Uganda, and Viet Nam—analysing them in more detail and establishing links between performance and good business practices or innovation policies. They and other countries have realised that technology adoption alone is no longer sufficient to maintain a high-growth scenario; rather, investment in innovation is now crucial to spur further catch-up. As a result, national innovation policy programmes and the corresponding institutional arrangements have flourished in low- and middle-income countries.
The top three economies in the GII rankings for each region are in sub-Saharan Africa, the top three are Mauritius, South Africa, and Senegal; in Central and Southern Asia—India, Kazakhstan, and Sri Lanka; in Latin America and the Caribbean—Chile, Costa Rica, and Mexico; in Northern Africa and Western Asia—Israel, Cyprus, and Saudi Arabia; in Southeast Asia and Oceania, are Singapore, Hong Kong (China), and the Republic of Korea; in Europe, these are Switzerland, the UK, and Sweden; in Northern America, there are only two—the USA and Canada.
The report noted that encouraging signs continue to emerge in sub- Saharan Africa. Following the trend identified in the GII last year, driven by selected countries, the sub-Saharan Africa region has caught up significantly. In addition to South Africa, some African countries—in particular, Burkina Faso, Kenya, Malawi, Rwanda, and Senegal—stand out for having made important progress.
Although Latin America and the Caribbean region’s GII rankings have been slow to improve, Brazil, Argentina, and Mexico stand out as economies performing above the region’s average GII score. The consistent over-performance of Chile, Costa Rica, and Colombia—in both regional terms and as compared to their peers of similar economic development—is also noteworthy, as is the emergent role of Peru and Uruguay.
Contributing on Benchmarking Innovation Outperformance at the Global and County Levels, Rafael Escalona Reynoso and Alexandra L. Bernard from Cornell University; Michaela Saisana from the Joint Research Centre at the European Commission; Martin Schaaper from UNESCO Institute for Statistics; and Sacha Wunsch-Vincent and Francesca Guadagno from WIPO, assessed the list of innovation achievers and pillar outperformers over the period 2011–2014 and identified a select group of 11 innovation outperformer economies. They stressed that, at the country level—especially in developing countries—the emphasis on fostering innovation has increased and national innovation policies and programmes are flourishing.
“Although tracking absolute levels of innovation over time is difficult, measuring such progress has become a priority for policy makers who are seeking ways to assess the effectiveness of their innovation policies and innovation systems. This interest has also been permeated by high-level international development-related discussions.
“By tracking global progress in innovation and focusing on those developing countries that out- perform in innovation compared to countries at similar levels of development, the GII can be used to monitor progress in innovation and identify areas of strengths and weaknesses in innovation efforts.
“The analysis within the chapter finds a growing percentage of countries with above-par performance (those that outperform their peers with a similar level of economic development). The number of these innovation achievers continues to increase through the period under study here, namely 2011–14,” the authors said.
Eight economies (China, India, Jordan, Kenya, the Republic of Moldova, Mongolia, Malaysia, and Viet Nam) can be signalled as innovation achievers, outperforming their peers on the over all GII score during 2011–14.
Fifteen economies (China, Costa Rica, Georgia, Ghana, Hungary, India, Kenya, the Republic of Moldova, Mongolia, Malaysia, Rwanda, Serbia, Thailand, Ukraine, and Viet Nam) outperformed their peers in at least four innovation input or output pillars during 2011–14.
Eleven developing countries (Armenia, China, Georgia, India, Jordan, Kenya, Malaysia, the Republic of Moldova, Mongolia, Uganda, and Viet Nam) are labelled ‘innovation outperformers’ because they conform to the following two more stringent rules: their GII score relative to their GDP is significantly higher than it is for other economies (they attain ‘innovation achiever’ status) for two or more recent years (including at least 2013 and 2014); and they outperform their income-group peers in a minimum of four innovation input or output pillars (they are designated ‘pillar outperformers’) for two or more years (including at least 2013 and 2014).
Innovation achievers seem to perform the strongest in market sophistication and knowledge and technology outputs. At low income levels, countries that outperform their peers focus on removing structural obstacles to innovation, such as poor access to finance and poor linkages within the innovation systems. At higher income levels, efforts concentrate on increasing investments, spurring growth in innovation outputs, and improving human capital.
Although the innovation system literature puts great emphasis on the role of human capital and institutions for innovation and development, these innovation input factors seem to be the most difficult of all inputs in which to achieve good scores, both in general and for low-income countries in particular. These results do not necessarily imply a lack of policy interest in these areas, but they might suggest that it is easier to outperform peers in certain inputs, either because efforts to improve these inputs bring more immediate benefits or because peer countries perform particularly poorly in these areas.
Research and development (R&D) is one of the key policy areas that can secure technological potential and, therefore, innovation and economic growth. In order to reach the income levels of high-income countries, low- and middle-income countries need to expand their access to technology and their capacity to use it.
Countries at higher income levels, instead, can benefit from more developed innovation systems, where education and research can effectively provide the knowledge and skills to boost innovation. This allows them to more effectively translate innovation efforts into knowledge and technology outputs.
Northern Africa and Western Asia (19 economies) Israel (22nd) and Cyprus (34th) achieve the top positions in the region for the third year running. Three of the six countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) come next: Saudi Arabia (43rd), the United Arab Emirates (47th), and Qatar (50th). Although the scaling by GDP of a few indicators (required for comparability across countries) penalises the relatively wealthy, resource-rich countries of the GCC, they often exhibit relative shortcomings in important areas in which this effect does not prevail, such as Institutions, Market sophistication, and Business sophistication. This phenomenon— reminiscent of what has been called the ‘resource curse’ or the ‘paradox of plenty’—has been discussed in the GII before. These GCC countries, however, are uniquely positioned to do better in the years to come. Many of them have been diversifying towards innovation-rich sectors already. Furthermore, the revisions to the PPP conversion factors implemented by the World Bank’s International Comparison Programme (ICP), a scaling factor used for 11 of the 79 GII variables, had a particularly significant impact on nine economies in this region, especially the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, Kuwait, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and Oman. Although the revised PPP values did not greatly affect the overall GII rankings in the region, they did affect some of the variable- level rankings. Most of the countries in this region rank in the top 100, including Turkey (58th), Bahrain (59th), Armenia (61st), Oman (69th), Georgia (73rd), Lebanon (74th), Jordan (75th), Tunisia (76th), Kuwait (77th), Morocco (78th), Azerbaijan (93rd), and Egypt (100th). Only two fall out of the top 100—Algeria (126th) and Yemen (137th).
Although Israel is the only innovation leader in the region, Armenia and Jordan remain in the group of innovation achievers (both are also flagged as innovation outperformers; and are joined by Morocco this year, while Georgia just falls out of this group. Morocco has made a notable improvement of eight places—another example of a country putting in effort to improve its innovation metrics. Improving at the raw data level in expenditure on education and government expenditure on secondary education per pupil are the main reasons for Morocco’s progress in human capital and research, where it advances from 64th to 56th. Conversely, its improvement in infrastructure is linked to methodological changes to the UN e-Government Survey methodology questionnaire. Lebanon, Azerbaijan, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Yemen, Algeria, Bahrain, Oman, Kuwait, and Qatar show below-par performances compared to their income levels (Figure 3). Israel falls seven places from 15th in 2014 to 22nd in 2015, yet still remains number one in the region. With an innovation input rank of 22 and an output rank of 16, it has improved its overall efficiency ratio ranking from 42nd to 20th. Israel’s biggest drops are in Human capital and research (fifth in 2014 to 11th in 2015), Market sophistication (12th in 2014 to 21st in 2015), and Business sophistication (third in 2014 to 11th this year). Since last year Israel has considerably improved its data availability. But while helping to provide a more accurate picture of its innovation ranking, the inclusion of these new data is partially responsible for Israel’s fall in Human capital and research and its overall ranking. Israel also makes some notable improvements at the variable level, particularly in applied tariff rates, communications, computer and information services imports, and cultural and creative services exports.
According to the report, measuring progress in innovation has become essential for policy makers seeking ways to assess the effectiveness of their innovation systems and polices. Interest in innovation measurement has even permeated high-level international development-related discussions. At the global level, the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), for instance, will set a new development agenda (see Box 1). Innovation has a large role to play in this agenda, both as a means to achieve improvements in health, environmental protection, food security, and so on, and as a goal in itself. The identification of cross-cutting indicators that can capture innovation progress is thus an ongoing process in the respective UN fora as well. 1nnovation needs to be understood broadly and also to be recognized as the result of complex interactions among various actors, such as firms, education and research organisations, and the public sector. Successful innovation also must incorporate the co-evolution of institutions and regulations as well as science, technology, and innovation policies. To produce a comprehensive measure for benchmarking innovation performance, it is necessary to go beyond readily available one-dimensional statistics such as research and development (R&D) expenditure and the number of patents, the report added.
