Center organizes an indicator report into six key areas:
innovation, competitiveness, growth, financial capacity,
human potential and quality of life. The index goes
on to provide insights into the performance of
12 metro areas within the state:
http://watechcenter.org/?p=Index+of+Innova-tion+% 26+Technology&s=510.
Regional innovation indexes are also beginning to
appear. The Council on Competitiveness encourages business, education and political leaders to measure their
regional competitiveness. To provide guidance, the council has published an important report on how to measure
regional innovation: www.compete.org/publica-
tions/detail/212/measuring-regional-innovation/.
Of course, measuring innovation is tricky. Earlier this
year, the U.S. Department of Commerce published an
important report from an advisory committee that is looking into how to measure innovation. The advisory committee’s report provides a valuable roadmap to improving
our understanding and measurement of innovation. In the
years ahead, new innovation indicator reports will emerge
at the local, regional and state levels:
www.innovationmetrics.gov.
Collapsing costs, market integration, innovation accel-
eration, talent shortages, the compression of product life
cycles: all of these factors create new complexities and the
challenge of building competitive
business. Indicator reports do not
provide answers, but they can pro-
vide insights. Tracking the different
dimensions of competitive perform-
ance is a tough job, and indicator
reports make the task simpler.
For a relatively small number of
executives, these reports can be useful in guiding expansion and relocation decisions. They will be even
more important to business executives actively engaged in the local
regional, state and national collaborations that will shape our country’s
long-term competitiveness. These
reports provide valuable insights
into how our country is responding
to the dramatically new challenges
of global competition.
A management maxim tells us
that we pay attention to what we
measure. Indicator reports provide
business leaders with tools to shape
perceptions and promote action.
These reports can guide public policy toward the long-term investments that we need to strengthen
our country’s competitiveness. ■
Ed Morrison is the economic policy
adviser at the Purdue University
Center for Regional Development.
He publishes EDPro, http://edpro-weblog.net, a leading Web log that
tracks developments in the field of
regional competitiveness. He sits on the
Regional Experts Committee of the
Council on Competitiveness. Morrison
is also the founder of two important
Web sites linking regions across the
country: WIRED Nation, http://wired-nation.net; and Bioscience Regions,
http://bioscienceregions.net.
