innovation index

Canadian provinces are overrepresented in North America’s most competitive states in the innovation economy with Ontario ranked third, British Columbia ranked fourth and Quebec ranked ninth, according to a competitiveness index from the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF). Massachusetts, California, Ontario and Maryland were named overall leaders in subnational innovation competitiveness.

North Carolina is continuing to improve its innovation standing and its research and development enterprise continue to lead among other innovation metrics, according to a new state report. The North Carolina Board of Science, Technology, and Innovation published the eighth edition of its Tracking Innovation report. This report uses 39 measures of innovation capacity to evaluate North Carolina’s standing against other states in the nation. In this year’s edition, the report dives even further by summarizing key measures at the county level along with state-by-state standings on many measures.

Utah and Maryland have climbed the ranks and moved into third and fourth place behind two long-standing leaders in the Information Technology and Information Foundation’s (ITIF) State New Economy Index. The index measures states’ structural capacity for successfully navigating a global economy that is increasingly driven by technological innovation. ITIF’s recent release of the updated 2020 index and state rankings provides a long-term picture of how several states have been strengthening their economies for the future.

The Massachusetts Technology Collaborative (MassTech) — the state agency responsible for strengthening the commonwealth’s position as a leading hub for innovation and entrepreneurship — recently released the 2019 edition of its annual report, The Index of the Massachusetts Innovation Economy, which includes an updated list of the 10 leading technology states  and a detailed special analysis on entrepreneurial ecosystems. As a globally recognized center of science- and technology-based innovation, communities across the U.S. can learn from Massachusetts’ successes as well as from the challenges the state faces in further strengthening its entrepreneurship ecosystem.

SSTI Note: Benchmarking innovation-driven entrepreneurship and the impacts of other science, technology and venture development activity in your state or region is more important than ever in the post-pandemic economy. Understanding the gains made prior to the onset of the coronavirus – and the inevitable setbacks resulting from its economic shocks – will be important for helping to build support and momentum for your initiatives going forward. The Illinois Innovation Index provides one useful model to approaching university entrepreneurship activity across institutions and geography.

While competition between states over business incentives and headquarters attraction is often derided, new research published in the Journal of Technology in Society suggests that competition in technology-based economic development is hardly a zero-sum game. In Persistent peers and the rhetoric of state economic competition, author David Schwarzkopf from Bentley University uses cluster analysis to track state progress across 53 TBED measures published by the NSF through its Science & Engineering Indicators series. Over a 12-year study period, Schwarzkopf finds that all 50 states improved on more than half of the variables used, with more than 60 percent of the states moving in the same direction on 80 percent of the measures. He argues that although states clearly compete, more focus is needed on how each state is making progress while also working to improve on their deficiencies.   

Two recently released indices assess countries and cities on the characteristics that enable female entrepreneurship. The 2015 Female Entrepreneurship Index finds the U.S., Australia, the U.K., Denmark and the Netherlands offer the world’s most attractive environments for high-potential female entrepreneurship. Meanwhile, the Dell Women Entrepreneur Cities Index ranks New York City, California’s Bay Area, London, Stockholm and Singapore as the top cities for female entrepreneurship. These indices may be useful to policymakers who are limited in their knowledge of the conditions that enable entrepreneurship, especially among females and other underrepresented communities.

Newly released research from the Kauffman Foundation finds that in 2016, Washington, D.C., Austin, San Jose, Columbus, and Nashville were the five highest ranked metropolitan areas for the Index of Growth Entrepreneurship. The five highest ranked states were Virginia, Utah, Maryland, Arizona, and Massachusetts. As described in the SSTI Digest last week, The Kauffman Index of Growth Entrepreneurship measures the growth of entrepreneurial businesses in the United States, complementing the foundation’s recently released Index of Startup Activity and Index of Main Street Entrepreneurship.

The Growth Dashboard, an annual report released by the Enterprise Research Centre, a policy advisory group with researchers from five United Kingdom business schools, and the government’s Business Growth Service, serves as a source of evidence to inform discussions on the country’s business support priorities. Presenting a set of growth metrics for startups and existing firms across a range of sub-national geographies in the UK, the metrics used in the annually updated dashboard are: 

As a whole, research produced in the U.S. is cited 49 percent more than the world average, according to a new report by the academic publishing company Elsevier in partnership with the Council of State Governments (CSG). In a data-driven assessment of each state’s comparative knowledge economy advantages based on the research they conduct and the knowledge they produce, America’s Knowledge Economy: A State-by-State Review outlines a process to help policymakers and other decision makers identify where states have research strengths and where they can improve. A ranking of states along select indicators of research performance can be found in the appendices of the report, though Elsevier and CSG also created state profiles containing information on the amount and types of publications in each state, comparative research advantages, citation impact tendencies, and other individualized characteristics.