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Sound measurement of innovation is crucial for policy making. It helps policy makers to evaluate the efficiency of their policies and spending and to assess the contribution of innovation to achieving social and economic objectives, and it legitimises public intervention by enhancing public accountability. Yet, the measures of innovation currently available do not adequately take account of the full role of innovation in today’s economy.
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Towards a Measurement Agenda for Innovation builds on the OECD’s half-century of indicator development and the challenge presented by the broad horizontal focus of the OECD Innovation Strategy. It identifies five broad areas in which international action is needed: develop innovation metrics that can be linked to aggregate measures of economic performance; invest in a highquality and comprehensive statistical infrastructure to analyse innovation at the firm-level; promote metrics of innovation in the public sector and for public policy evaluation; find new and interdisciplinary approaches to capture knowledge creation and flows; promote the measurement of innovation for social goals and of social impacts of innovation. These five key areas of action, if endorsed, would be the basis for a forward-looking, longer-term, international measurement agenda for innovation. The development and implementation of such an agenda imply a relatively long time frame. It calls for the efforts of the statistical community but also the engagement of policy makers to define user needs and of researchers to use the data, analyse impacts and feed into the development of appropriate metrics and data infrastructures. It also requires the engagement of organisations, businesses, universities and the public sector, because the statistical system can only collect what it is feasible to measure inside organisations.
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