18 January 2007

Innovation: U.S. in league of its own

A ranking by a prominent European business school found the U.S. by far the world’s most innovative nation.

Insead (http://www.insead.edu), a business school based near Paris with campuses there and in Singapore, said the U.S. is the top country in generating new ideas, adapting them quickly, and profiting from them. Germany was a distant second.

Source: WSJ

“The U.S. leads the second most innovative nation by almost a full point, putting it in a league of its own as far as global innovation is concerned,” the Insead report said.

The United Arab Emirates, ranked 14th, was the only country in the top 15 that wasn’t European, Asian, or North American.

In other studies, the World Bank rated the U.S. third, behind Singapore and New Zealand, on ease of doing business. The U.S. was No. 3, behind Canada and Australia, in terms of starting a new business, the bank said.

Insead researchers looked at data from the World Bank, the World Economic Forum’s annual Executive Opinion survey, and the International Telecommunications Union. They studied to what degree nations and regions respond to the challenge of innovation.

Innovation is important, researchers said, because successful economies won’t continue to rely on trying to wring more returns from today’s goods, services, and processes.

The study used several categories: institutions and policies; infrastructure; human capacity; technological sophistication; and business markets and capital. It also factored in nations’ knowledge, competitiveness, and wealth.

The focus was on 107 nations affiliated with the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. After the U.S. and Germany were the U.K., Japan, and France.