EAGER: Collaborative Research: How Innovative are Innovations?: Refining survey-based measures of innovation

对创新进行概念化和衡量是非常困难的。国际创新界一直在根据经济合作与发展组织（OECD）编制国家调查来衡量创新。它依赖于简单的分类区分。这个项目超越了绝对的区分，通过经济、技术和独特性的维度来描述公司在特定市场上最畅销的创新。通过与其他现有的公共和私人数据进行比较，并通过检查公司、行业和地区特征，这些创新措施得到了验证。该项目的结果为其他创新调查提供了指导，以增进我们对创新驱动因素的理解。将创新视为一个多维概念，为分析人员提供了校准特定创新重要性的工具。这项分析使研究人员和政策制定者能够评估所讨论的创新在某种意义上是否重要，从而对对创新感兴趣的各种社区有意义。该项目利用了美国竞争力调查（一项私人创新调查）的数据，并将其与美国国家科学基金会商业研发与创新调查、欧洲共同体创新调查和卡内基梅隆调查（另一项私人研发调查）的数据结合起来。

Conceptualizing and measuring innovation is surprisingly difficult. The international innovation community has been measuring innovation by developing national surveys based on the OECD?s Oslo manual that rely on the simple categorical distinction. This project goes beyond the categorical distinction by characterizing firms' top-selling innovations in a given market along the dimensions of economic, technical and uniqueness. These measures of innovation are validated by comparisons with other existing public and private data and by examining the firm, industry, and regional characteristics. Results from the project provide guidance for other innovation surveys to advance our understanding of the drivers of innovation.Approaching innovation as a multidimensional concept provides analysts the tools to calibrate the importance of a given innovation. The analysis allows researchers and policymakers to assess whether the innovations in question are important in a sense that will be meaningful for the various communities interested in innovation. This project exploits data from the American Competitiveness Survey, a private innovation survey, and combines it with data from the NSF Business R&D and Innovation Survey, the European Community Innovation Survey, and the Carnegie Mellon Survey, another private R&D survey.