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Advancing measures of innovation in the United States

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Abstract

This paper introduces major themes addressed in this special issue, which is based on NSF's Division of Science Resources Statistics (SRS) workshop Advancing Measures of Innovation—Knowledge Flows, Business Metrics, and Measurement Strategies, held on June 6-7, 2006 near Washington, D.C. The first two sections describe the workshop and provide a brief background on R & D and innovation metrics. The last section introduces the papers. They are based on selected workshop presentations along with additional invited papers.

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Notes

  1. The America Creating Opportunities to Meaningfully Promote Excellence in Technology, Education, and Science (COMPETES) Act was signed August 9, 2007. For full text see http://www.thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d110:h.r.02272:

  2. For a compilation of official definitions of R & D see NSF/SRS (2006).

  3. Marburger, John H., AAAS S&T Policy Forum Keynote Address, Washington, D.C. April 21, 2005, http://www.aaas.org/news/releases/2005/0421marburgerText.shtml; Marburger, John H., Wanted: Better Benchmarks, Science, Vol. 308: 1087, 20 May 2005.

  4. For more information on this program see http://www.nsf.gov/dir/index.jsp?org=SBE.

  5. For further information see http://www.innovationmetrics.gov/.

  6. A related but separate area of interest for policymaking is metrics for program evaluation. See for example, Larson and Brahmakulam (2002), Lepori (2007), NRC (2007c), and Ruegg and Feller (2003).

  7. For information on the ongoing revision of the 1993 SNA, see http://unstats.un.org/unsd/sna1993/snarev1.asp.

  8. In the words of Rosenberg, “a high degree of scientific originality [has] been neither necessary nor sufficient condition for technological dynamism” (1982; pp. 13–14).

  9. See Bartel et al. (2004) for special purpose data collections to study technology use, human resources practices, and productivity.

  10. For an overview of organizational capital and alternative empirical approaches see chapters 2, 3, and 6 in Corrado et al. (2005).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. National Science Foundation (NSF), 4201 Wilson Blvd. Suite 965, Arlington, VA, 22230, USA

    Francisco Moris, John Jankowski & Pierre Perrolle

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  1. Francisco Moris
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  2. John Jankowski
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  3. Pierre Perrolle
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Correspondence to Francisco Moris.

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Views expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of NSF.

The authors, along with Dr. Kaye Husbands Fealing, Science Advisor for Science of Science Policy, NSF, were co-editors of the papers featured in this special issue.

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Moris, F., Jankowski, J. & Perrolle, P. Advancing measures of innovation in the United States. J Technol Transfer 33, 123–130 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10961-007-9075-6

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