Assisting regional policy by rapidly comparing enterprise innovation between regions

Purpose: Regional development must heavily rely on innovation in order to be competitive and improve the standard of living of its citizens. However, regional policies regarding innovation is often limited by decelerated decision making process which is often based on outdated qualitative information and data which are difficult to statistically analyze. In order to continuously evaluate the progress of regions and assess different innovation indicators in shorter periods, a quantitative measurement of innovation should be followed. Design/methodology/approach: To this end, we collected data from firms belonging to two geographically different regions in order to develop, present, and evaluate a research approach and present the statistical methods which can be applied in order to benchmark innovation strengths and weaknesses between different regions and apply consequent policy actions. Findings: Both our research approach and application of the methodology successfully examined the usage of an applicable research instrument and nonparametric statistical analysis to enhance data collection used in regional policy development related to innovation. We present the application of these tools and the results of the comparison as a test case. Research limitation/implications: Our study, being an initial effort to develop a simple rapid tool and provide the methodological background to measure and compare regional enterprise innovation, is limited considering the number of innovation characteristics examined and the applicability of our research tool and methodologies on a single pair of regions. Practical implications: This paper focuses on examining the ways the data are collected through the measurement of common innovation characteristics that can be easily and validly analyzed in order to aid regional innovation policy makers. Originality/value: A significant consideration for both researchers and policy makers is the relatively low frequency of data collection based on surveys. We propose a quantitative measurement of innovation, focusing on the benchmarking of innovativeness of firms, which can be applied easily in practice, in order to benchmark the innovation strengths and weaknesses between different regions and apply consequent policy actions.