Long abstract

About Statistics Publications & Documents Information by Country

The adaptation of production to new knowledge and ideas is a crucial factor for maintaining and improving competitiveness and generating wealth. At the OECD ministerial meeting in May 2007, ministers underlined that innovation performance is a crucial determinant of competitiveness, productivity and national progress, and that it is an important key to addressing global challenges such as climate change and sustainable development. Emphasising the crosscutting nature of innovation, they endorsed a mandate for the OECD to develop a comprehensive Innovation Strategy.

In the context of strategies to promote growth through innovation, governments are increasingly realising that the regional dimension of innovation is crucial. This realisation is now shared among ministries of economy and finance, science, technology and industry, and regional development.
OECD-GOV work on regional innovation is designed to help policy makers from different policy backgrounds and at both national and regional levels to improve the evidence base for targeting policy, make better use of resources in different regional contexts, ensure coherence between innovation and other policy objectives and evaluate the impact of their policies at regional and national level. Current work includes an ongoing series of  reviews of innovation in regions from a national and regional perspective (UK, Italy and Mexico) and analysis of innovation indicators using the OECD Regional Database’s innovation indicators dataset.