Published on the 10/07/2013 | Written by Newsdesk
Australia has managed to improve its ranking on the Global Innovation Index rising from 23rd to 19th slot this year, although the nation’s application of ICT does not rate so highly…
The Global Innovation Index for 2013, which is intended to rank different nations’ ability to innovate and their success in doing so, has been released, showing Australia has climbed four places in a year, to be ranked 23rd in the world. New Zealand pips Australia with its 17th ranking – although that is significantly lower than the 13th ranking it achieved in the 2012 index.
The brainchild of Johnson Cornell University, Insead and the World Intellectual Property Organisation, the Index is a composite measure of a nation’s ability to innovate based on a broad matrix of political, economic, educational and scientific indicators which can be used by nations and industries to benchmark their innovation prowess. According to the report global innovation investment in 2013 is such that, “At no point in history has so much money been spent in R&D worldwide. Never before has innovation been so well distributed among countries.”
While Australia has clambered through the rankings, there are areas where it deserves a “could do better” report card. For example the nation was only 30th in terms of its investment in software; 48th in high or medium tech output; 60th in high tech exports; and a woeful 77th in communications, computer and information services exports.
Also when respondents to the survey were asked “to what extent is ICT creating new business models, services and products”, or organisational models, Australia ranked just 27th even though we are 19th in terms of ICT access and use. (We also rank 27th in terms of our monthly Wikipedia updates – Icelanders, Estonians and Norwegians are the most enthusiastic in this regard). So, while the Australian landscape might be conducive to innovation, it appears organisations are slower than some international peers in terms of fully exploiting technology to drive innovation.
Australian businesses are not alone in this. In an introduction to the report, Cesare Mainardi, CEO of global consulting firm Booz & Co, noted that only 43 percent of senior innovation executives and CEOs believe that their organisations are highly effective at generating new ideas and only 36 percent claimed to be highly effective in turning those ideas into products.
