Composite innovation metrics: MCDA and the Quadruple Innovation Helix framework

Innovation is a complex, dynamic, socio-technical, socio-economic and socio-political phenomenon which needs to be approached in a holistic manner to be properly measured and assessed. In this paper, we revisit the national and regional Innovation Scoreboards using a multiple criteria decision analysis (MCDA) approach in the context of the Quadruple Innovation Helix (QIH) framework. We deploy an MCDA approach combining AHP and TOPSIS methods which merges data from Government, University, Industry, and Civil Society sectors (the four QIH actors or helices) and overcomes limitations of the existing Innovation Scoreboard approach by incorporating the different preference systems of the QIH Helix actors. The findings illustrate the power and promise of our approach as an alternative composite innovation metric. Estimating the different preferences of innovation stakeholders gives the ability to develop policies and practices oriented towards specific QIH actors. Estimating the importance that each QIH actor assigns to different innovation aspects is critical policy-wise and practice-wise as it provides a perspective on relative efficacies and potential ways and means to calculate differential efficacies for alternative configurations of resource allocations. These results underlie specific policies, practices, and priorities therein based on the relative re-distribution of weights.