Viva la Innovación!

Where is Latin America on the world map of innovation excellence? According to INSEAD’s Global Innovation Index, the whole region is pretty much nowhere. The bleak news from the 2011 index, published about 6 months ago, is that only Chile made it into the top 40 (at number 38). Costa Rica and Brazil followed, at numbers 45 and 47 respectively. Then came Argentina, ranked at 58, and Uruguay at 64. Colombia, Paraguay and Panama were all ranked in the 70s, Mexico, Peru and Guatemala in the 80s, El Salvador, Ecuador and Honduras in the 90s, and finally Venezuela came in at 102, Nicaragua at 110 and Bolivia at 112, which puts these last three economies almost on a par with countries like Swaziland, Tanzania, Rwanda, Cambodia and Madagascar, according to a report in Innovation Excellence.

But that’s exactly why the Global Innovation Index is so misleading. It’s based on a particular set of variables—such as R&D expenditure, the number of patents filed or trademarks registered, the number of Ph.D.-holders in the population, the number of published scientific papers, and other issues like government policies, fiscal rules, and levels of economic productivity. These indicators are insufficient for measuring the true level of innovation performance inside a country, and they certainly fail to create an accurate picture of Latin America’s activity and potential. As INSEAD admits in a chapter of the index entitled “Innovation in Latin America: Recent Insights”, ‘These variables are undoubtedly of great importance, but they focus on technologically oriented, patentable innovations and fail to capture non-technological innovations and new-to-market or new-to-firm innovations.’ Lourdes Casanova, INSEAD lecturer in comparative management and one of the authors of the chapter, says, “We [tend to] measure innovation in very traditional ways” but “capturing innovation [in Latin America] does not come from traditional sources.”  >>More here

SOURCE: innovationexcellence.com