Error In CII-INSEAD Global Innovation Report
By: Vipin P. Veetil
The Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) and INSEAD recently released the annual Global Innovation Report. In 2009–10 India ranked 101 on ‘innovative efficiency’, in just twelve months India leaped to 9! Reason to celebrate? I think not.
The CII explains the jump by saying:
“The decline in input factors — political stability, regulatory environment, human capital, research and development, infrastructure, market sophistication and business sophistication — coupled with an improvement in scientific and creative output, has led to this stupendously high efficiency index for the country.”
A rather unconvincing explanation for the following reasons:
- India experienced substantial inflation in 2010–11. I am not sure input prices declined
- I don’t think political stability improved from 2009–10 to 2010–11
- No significant reforms happened in 2010–11, so regulatory environment has remained unchanged
- Infrastructural development in 2010–11 has been no different from the year before. We had commented on slack in infrastructural development in an earlier post
- Market sophistication and business sophistication remain undefined
- I do not see any reason for a quantum improvement in scientific and creative output in 2010–11
The 2009–10 Global Innovation Report says that:
“Innovation efficiency is another important parameter of gauging the performance of economies and there is an interesting trend here. Asia scores the highest in innovation efficiency followed by Europe, Africa and America. If we calculate the average score of the OECD countries across all the pillars, the average value for all the seven pillar turns out to be greater than the respective scores for the regions.
Among the emerging economies of Indonesia, Turkey and the BRIC countries, the leader is the Chinese economy, followed by India, Russia, Turkey, Brazil and Indonesia respectively in that order.”
The 2009–10 report ranks China 14 on ‘innovation efficiency’, Russia 30, Turkey 67, Brazil 68 and Indonesia 72. How can India be rank 101 if it is to be between China and Russia?
CII’s official statement is just a collection of words, no meaning. Sadly several leading newspapers published the data and CII’s statement senza critical thinking.
To read Global Innovation Reports click below
