Department of Commerce Addresses Need for New Ideas in Measuring Innovation

Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez recently announced the creation of a 15-member advisory committee to examine methods used around the country to measure innovation. The panel, dubbed the Measuring Innovation in the 21st Century Economic Advisory Committee, will be composed of academia and private industry representatives and will convene this fall to identify new ways to assess regional innovation activity and the impact of innovation policies. An interim report is due in early 2007, with a final draft to follow by the end of next year.

In his announcement, Gutierrez singled out the need to expand the commonly understood definition of innovation to include not only new products and services, but also process improvements that boost business productivity.

New approaches to assessing innovation realities and practices have been attracting greater attention in recent months. In June 2006, the National Science Foundation (NSF) held a two-day workshop of academics and government officials to share the latest methods in innovation data collection and analysis. The results will be shared in an upcoming issue of the Journal of Technology Transfer. Similar discussions will take place next month in Ottawa at the Organization for Economic Development and Cooperation’s Blue Sky II Forum, which will address the global need for updated innovation taxonomies and metrics.

Read the Department of Commerce announcement at: http://www.commerce.gov/opa/press/Secretary_Gutierrez/2006_Releases/August/04_InnovationRelease.htm

To view many of the presentations from the NSF workshop, Advancing Measures of Innovation: Knowledge Flows, Business Metrics, and Measurement Strategies, go to: http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/workshop/innovation06/

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