Innovation clearly has a tremendous influence on actual and future manufacturing
Booz&Co (international management consultancy) is co-promoting every year a Global Innovation Index (GII), now the 2013 edition (417 pages) published jointly by Cornell University (USA), INSEAD (CH), and WIPO the World Intellectual Property Organisation, Geneva, Switzerland, as well as Booz & Company, the Confederation of Indian Industry, du, and Huawei support the elaboration of the GII as Knowledge Partners in 2013
It is not only a ranking list, but a comprehensive survey, study and report on all aspects of innovation. TextileFuture is extracting and commenting the most decisive facts with a particular focus on textile and textile machinery relevant factors.
The analysis of the ranking gives already the hint that innovation correlates to some extent with the economic development of a country, its tradition or its novelty. This might sound controversial, but it depends if we are looking on traditional countries, or developing countries and we find different results confirming the same facts. There has to be also a deepening look into regional developments. When putting the puzzle together, we get a rather clear picture of the actual and future situation on the actual and future manufacturing world.
The Top Ranking list
The list of the top 10 countries can be had from Table 1
This year’s report is throwing additional light on the local dynamics of innovation, an area that has remained globally under-measured. It shows the emergence of original innovation eco-systems, and signals a needed shift from a usual tendency to try and duplicate previously successful initiatives. WIPO Director General, Francis Gurry stated: “Dynamic innovation hubs are multiplying around the world, despite the difficult state of the global economy. These hubs leverage local advantages with a global outlook on markets and talent”. He added: “For national level policy makers seeking to support innovation, realising the full potential of innovation in their own backyards, is often a more promising approach than trying to emulate successful innovation models elsewhere!”
The performance of Switzerland and Sweden reflects that both counties are leaders in all components (pillars) of GII, consistently ranking in the top 25. Great Britain has a well balanced innovation performance, ranking 4th in both input and output, despite a relatively low level of growth in labour productivity. The U.S. continues to benefit from its strong education base, especially in terms of top ranking universities, and has seen strong increases in software spending and employment in knowledge intensive services. The U.S. was last in the GII top 5 in 2009, when it was number one.
The top 25 ranked countries on the GII are a mix of nations from across the world – North America, Europe, Asia, Oceania and the Middle East. While high income economies dominate the list, several new players have increased their innovation capabilities and outputs. On average, high income countries outpace developing countries by a wide margin across tzhe board in terms of scores; a persistent innovation divide exists, states Soumitra Dutta, co-editor of the report and Anne and Elmer Lindseth Dean, Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management, Cornell University. 18 emerging economies are outperforming other countries in their respective income groups in order of distance, namely Moldova, China, India, Uganda, Armenia, Vietnam, Malaysia, Jordan, Mongolia, Mali Kenya, Senegal, Hungary, Georgia, Montenegro, Costa Rica, Tajikistan and Latvia. All of them demonstrate rising levels of innovation compared with their peers. Of course, progress is not of a uniform nature, it is a result of tackling the formulation of a good policy mix on all meaningful fronts, such as institutions, skills, infrastructures, integration to global markets and linkages with the business community. By and large, Latin America is the region that has seen the most significant improvement in GII rankings, with Costa Rica taking the lead regional position.
The 10 Top Ranking Regions can be had from Table 2
Barry Jaruzelski, Senior Partner and leader of the Global Engineered Products & Services Practice at Booz & Company, stated: “Underperforming countries can boost their innovation capabilities by developing hubs in which large companies, whose business goals are aligned with the objectives of innovation hub, can play a key catalyst role. Enterprise champions, including state owned enterprises, family owned conglomerates, and multinational corporations, can be the critical drivers of innovation hub activities. These enterprise champions can facilitate the building of hub capabilities and their talent pools by stimulating innovation and by helping to bridge the gap between research and commercial success”.
What innovation means
Innovation success leads to the emergence of a virtuous circle, once a critical threshold has been reached, investment attracts investment, talent attracts talent, and innovation generates more innovation.
Also local conditions in different parts of the world play an important role, however many innovation strategies have been focused on trying to replicate previous successes elsewhere, such as Silicon Valley in California (USA), but fostering local innovation requires strategies that should be deeply rooted in local comparative advantages, history and culture. It is mandatory that these are combined with a global approach to reach out to foreign markets, and to attract overseas talent.
The creation of an environment that could unleash potential for innovation for all is to unlock the true, tangible potential of value creation, laying the groundwork for societal change and develop a framework for cohesive synergies through collaboration. “The unprecedented socio-economic momentum that has been created in the last few decades in the UAE United Arab Emirates makes these countries very well position to continue to play a pivotal role in the exciting journey as aregion hub for innovation” states Osman Sultan, CEO of du.
R&D as a basis for innovations
R&D expenditures in most countries have grown since 2010 and at the business front, R&D expenditures of the top one thousand R&D spending companies have grown between 9 to 10 % in 2010-11, and continued in a similar pattern throughout 2012.
Most remarkable is that emerging markets have increased their R&D faster than high income countries. Over the last five years, China, Argentina, Brazil, Poland, India, Russia, Turkey and South Africa have been at the forefront of this phenomenon. Emerging markets, and notably China, are also largely driving the growth in patent filings worldwide. Li Yingtao, Head of Huawei’s 2012 R&D laboratories adds: “In the global economy, innovation from anywhere can drive change and crate new opportunities everywhere. Everyone concerned with innovation as a catalyst for economic and social development needs to remain focused on how the value of innovation is to transform industries, business and people’s lives, not just locally but across the world”.
A breakdown of Innovation per Income Bracket is presented in Table 3
Other trends
A recent article in Nature analysed the citation patterns of articles published in key physics journals, found that, although the USA accounted for 85.6% of the published papers in the 1960s, this proportion has declined to 36.7% in the past decade. Seven new centres of knowledge creation have arisen in Europe and Asia. However, this study also found that, although scientific research has become more globally distributed, its production remains highly concentrated and uneven or spiky. The world’s leading cities for the production of scientific papers at the highest levels have remained essentially the same for the past three decades.
Examples of innovation systems or entities at the local (sub-national) level typically include clusters. They also include innovation driven enterprises, regions, cities, or universities that are not linked to each other in a sufficiently structured way to be described as clusters. Recent studies brought more light to this aspect. Until the 1990s, a linear model of innovation policy was dominant. It led to focus on providing R&D infrastructure, financial support for innovation in companies, and technology transfer. More recently, innovative regions and spaces have increasing attention.
Some selected data from implemented innovations at company level can be had from Table 4
Other aspects are to be read when looking at the list of the world’s top 20 patent filing regions. Some of them have dominating innovative industrial sectors, either in IT, engineering (machines and textile machinery), automotive. More details can be had from Table 5
The list of the top ranking outsourcing cities is reflecting also the trends in the traditional industries, among textiles, clothing and textile machinery Table 6 a offers the list of outsourcing cities
Table 6 b reflects the destinations of outsourcing
A very interesting prerequisite of success is presented in Table 7, namely the Regional Innovation Scoreboard (RIS) explaining the detailed success items from a European perspective.
We would like also to bring to you the innovation hub value chain to your attention. It can be had from Table 8
Of course there are many other aspects illuminated in this report, including 146 country profiles, including data, ranks, strengths and weaknesses based upon 84 indicators. There are in total 84 data tables for indicators from over 30 international public and private sources, 60 thereof offering hard data, 19 composite indicators and 5 survey questions. Also the scientific model for the evaluation of rankings and methods is explained, including the Innovation Output Sub-index capturing the innovation results, divided in two pillars: knowledge and technology outputs and creative outputs.
All in all, the Global Innovation Index 2013 is a most valuable and compendium on all aspects of innovation, however there is no detailed information on textile and textile machinery relevant factors. Nevertheless, the comprehensive manner of breaking down the major factors making innovations successful is worth the pain of going through the publication and to take all aspects into consideration for your own business purposes. The work can be downloaded from the link below.