How can you assess the potential impact of innovation on the socioeconomic indicators of any economy?

11 November 2013 3 2K Report

Can innovation be measured? I am interested in investigating the potential socioeconomic impacts of innovations on economies and societies. There is a slight problem here. You cannot know beforehand the impact of such innovations on any society, simply because of it's novelty. There are no prior cases of its existence and hence no historical account of its impact.. Because if there were any, it wouldn't really qualify as an innovation.

What qualifies as an innovation in a society where it cannot be a necessity as opposed to another society? The booming M-Pesa e-money system in Kenya might not be considered by the global mass of the US population as a ground breaking app.

Accordingly identifying innovations which have or potentially have a socioeconomic impact on societies is a tough and difficult problem.

Any ideas?

Perhaps relying on the Millineum Development Goals (MDGs) - which more or less are accepted on a global and international level - as a way of assessing potential impacts through the extent, the innovation is deemed to affect the MDGs in a specific society.

Tomy Patzelt

Hi, I can provide some info only on the first half of question which is "Can innovation be measured?" Europe uses so called "Innovation Index" for this purpose. It consists from 24 parameters and more detailed description can be found on the first below mentioned link. The second link is added just for completeness I havent looked into it in detail.

http://ec.europa.eu/enterprise/policies/innovation/files/ius-2013_en.pdf

http://www.globalinnovationindex.org/content.aspx?page=GII-Home

Hope it will help.

Ramy A. Fathy

Thanks Muhamed,, that does sound interesting.. I will explore on that issue further..

Ramy A. Fathy

A rather different angle here.. In the literature you find a relationship between innovation and n-person cooperation and communication. I quote from Evolution of Innovation-Enhancing Institutions, by Henrich the following "Rather than dyadic cooperation of the prestige and apprentice systems, cultural systems that can create higher degrees of stable n-person cooperation, and in which individuals share widely what they know and invent, will energize population rates of both invention and innovation"

That could possibly mean the use if some sort of a correlation function with the population’s size and its degree of cultural interconnectedness; to estimate the level of innovation.

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