On the methodology for quantifying innovations

Human ingenuity will play an ever-important role in this century and into the foreseeable future. This is because of phenomena such as globalization and climate-change that stress the need for more innovative output from developed countries. Such a picture has made it necessary to develop reliable models for quantifying innovations. The huge momentum behind the need for quantifying innovations is brought out by the research efforts of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the United-States (US) government, which are at the forefront of the modeling activities required for this task. This effort describes some approaches, and the resulting models, for scoring individual innovations. Most of these approaches quantify innovations by considering their ensuing societal impact. In the course of this process, numerous variables have been identified that might have a significant influence from a scoring perspective. This work is the first portion of a research effort that addresses the theoretical background needed for quantifying innovations. The empirical results will follow up in a later work. © 2010 Imperial College Press.