The use of TOPSIS for Ranking WIPO's Innovation Indicators/USO DE TOPSIS PARA CLASIFICAR LOS INDICADORES DE INNOVACION DE LA OMPI/USO DE TOPSIS PARA CLASSIFICAR OS INDICADORES DE INOVACAO DA OMPI/L'UTILISATION DE TOPSISPOUR CLASSER LESINDICATEURS D'INNOVATION DE L'OMPI.
| Autor | Carmo Silva, Marcela do |
Introduction
Innovation activities and the use of intellectual assets have joined to promote research and development (R&D) investments in the least developed countries, which face additional difficulties for innovation caused by the lack of basic infrastructure and knowledge related with innovation processes (Takagi & Czaijkowski, 2012). Innovation can be seen as market experiments seeking broad and extensive changes which fundamentally restructure industries and markets. Thus, this is the fundamental basis of capitalism, since it is a production system that needs constant renewal and the reinvigoration of its consumer goods and capital (Pereira, Verocai, Cordeiro, Gomes, & Costa, 2015).
Therefore, least developed countries--that have already suffered from economic weaknesses and basic production infrastructure--are confronted with bureaucratic issues for researching, understanding and analyzing innovation information for their promotion (Takagi & Czaijkowski, 2012).
Considering a country's development in the innovation and intellectual property concept, there are different perspectives, such as to perceive an intellectual property development system as part of evolution. Hence, countries are considered socially and economically developed when they have associating economic systems that promote innovation (Olwan, 2011). Consequently, acknowledging a country as an innovator implies the analysis and recording of the adaptations and innovations (even if they are benchmarked) that show the best practices in the productive processes aimed at raising the national intellectual property (Cornell University, INSEAD, &WIPO, 2015).
As an experiment, multiple-criteria decision-making (MCDM) is used for observing Global Innovation Indicators (GII) data in a compensatory ranking. It occurs because in multiple criteria ranking alternatives are compared pairwise and the results express preferences with the use of comparative notions. Ranking, choosing or sorting decisions with respect to a finite set of alternatives evaluated on a finite set of criteria is a problem of uttermost importance in many real-world areas of decision-making. The application of MCDM methods is an important tool for managers of public or private organizations (Hashemia, Hajiaghab, Zavadskasc, & Mahdirajid, 2016). As decisions are dynamic, decisionmakers (DM) must be convinced that the analysis process is conducted properly and thoroughly in order to enable the DM to estimate the potential outcome of his/her decision (Gomes, Costa, & Barros, 2017).
With that in mind, the aim of this article is to use the MCDM technique known as Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to the ideal solution (TOPSIS) in a process of aggregation/ordering for innovation indicators of African, Asian and Oceanic countries, verifying the method application adherence regarding the observed rank in the employed methodology by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) in 2015 to classify the most "innovative" countries in their regions. It is important to mention Silva, Gavião, Gomes, and Lima (2017), who also used TOPSIS for understanding WIPO and GII qualitative analysis from a quantitative multicriteria perspective. However, our paper does not use entropy for achieving different weights than the obtained by those authors; instead, our work uses two normalization steps regarding TOPSIS works applications procedures.
Because of constant methodological changes in the innovation and correlation perceptions of indicators and their sub-items, there is a restrictive analysis in WIPO'S methodology in observing only the 2015 report. Therefore, the MCDM method is restricted in the TOPSIS method because it does not evaluate historical series due to such changes.
This article is organized in five sections. First, we include the present introductory section. The second section presents the innovation context of African, Asian and Oceanic countries. The third section explains the conceptual framework considering multicriteria and TOPSIS methodology application. The fourth section discusses TOPSIS results based on WIPO'S rankings. Finally, the fifth section ends this paper with conclusions and possible future studies.
Innovation aspects in African, Asian and Oceania Countries Integrated into WIPO'S Principles
The 1883 Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property and 1886 Berne's Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works, which established that copyright subsists when the creative or intellectual work is "fixed" in some way, led to the establishment in Stockholm of the World Intellectual Property Organisation Convention (Peters et al., 2016), institutionalizing WIPO as the intellectual property world hub. As an international institution specialized in intellectual property, WIPO has several publications with comparative analysis about innovation and intellectual properties aspects from the countries associated with the institution (Romero-Ciprian & Ramírez-Guapacha, 2012). Annually, WIPO publishes a Global Innovation Index (GII) report that explains the methodology for ranking the countries, the principles of innovation that were analyzed, and the way indicators were formulated.
The GII 2015 was published with 7 innovations indicators showing world innovation grade. The first indicator is "Institutions", where political and economic data and regulations are considered to understand a country's conjuncture. Human capital and research is the second indicator, observing education system and R&D. Indicator number 3 is "Infrastructure", which approaches information and communication technologies' (ICTS) development aligned to general infrastructure and ecological sustainability. "Market sophistication" is indicator number 4, showing credit, investment, and trade and competition's behavior. Indicator number 5 is "Business sophistication", observing knowledge workers, innovation linkages, and knowledge absorption. "Knowledge and technology outputs" is indicator number 6 and studies knowledge as a creation and its impact and diffusion in the economy. Indicator number 7 is named "Creative outputs" and deals with intangible assets, creative goods and services, and online creativity.
Whilst nations in the developed world become more globalized, innovation linkages are quickly gaining prominence, leading to collaboration among nations and involving academia and industry as key drivers of economic growth, since innovation is considered a critical factor in the growth of the dynamic clusters of nations that supports policies and empowers people beyond national boundaries, with the ability to solve problems at all levels, e.g. individual, social, regional, and global. This growing trend of increasing global connectivity promotes a standardized way of measuring and analyzing innovation data through key indicators, considering technology transfer offices, business incubators located in universities, and creative economy propagation. That is the case of the dissemination in observing intellectual property of indigenous culture in their drug treatments, their methods of cultural identity of works of art, and their constitution and native peoples specific production processes; as an example, we can mention the intellectual property (IP) protection in the use of the harakeke granted to indigenous people through the Maori advisory committee interests in New Zealand (Peters et al., 2016).
However, the innovation system literature puts great emphasis on the role of human capital and institutions for innovation and development. The innovation input factors seem to be the most difficult of all inputs in which to achieve good scores, both in general and for low-income countries. These variations in innovation and competitiveness were analyzed by Beneito, Rochina-Barrachina, and Sanchis (2014), who studied the role of industrial property rights (IPRS) in creating incentives for innovation, identifying IPRS not only act by providing temporary monopoly power to innovators, since they may have direct effects on innovation beyond their indirect effect through competition. Notably, when national innovation policies and programmes were flourishing by the need to spur innovation in order to foster economic growth and find solutions to social challenges, WIPO changed the GII methodology; although maintaining its principles for measuring and comparing innovation performance, with the aim of understanding how their local efforts have improved their capacity to innovate (Cornell University, INSEAD, & WIPO, 2015).
The 2015 GII observed that developed countries showed a strong and sustained innovation performance over the last years--even after changing the methodology for calculating their performance--and the degree of heterogeneity among these countries is significant: they range from relatively small European and Western Asian countries, such as Georgia, the Republic of Moldova, and Jordan, to important global players, such as China and India. One commonality among them is their relatively stronger performance in production of knowledge and technologies (Cornell University, INSEAD, & WIPO, 2015).
Besides innovation linkages, the creative economy emerges as an espousal of thinking where culture is seen primarily as embodying tradable economic value, and creative nations, regions and cities are now so much part of the competitive landscape that everyone takes them for granted (Schlesinger, 2017). These economy perspectives are thoughtfully observed by Sampath (2014) for understanding innovation in Africa regarding the paradoxical industrial development--catching up successful experiences or identifying Africa current context--and the continuous newer divides occurring, as current global political context is very different from the world in which the earlier tiers of new industrialized economies of East Asia and BRICS emerged, in a signal of a new development model...
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