By Mae Kowalke
The fifth edition of the Global Innovation Index (GII)—which ranks 141 countries on the basis of innovation capabilities and results—was released last week in Geneva, Switzerland.
The index was developed by INSEAD eLab and the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), with experience from knowledge partners Alcatel-Lucent, Booz & Company and the Confederation of Indian Industry.
For Alcatel-Lucent, assisting with the GII is part of its overall commitment to further innovation, the company said in a blog post. “Alcatel-Lucent is a global company with employees all over the world,” the company said. “The GII is one of the places where we can exercise this role as a global citizen, dig deeper into innovative ideas and work closely together on common objectives with other global players.”
In helping with the index, Alcatel-Lucent said it focused on the ancient collaboration between the public and private sectors because that relationship plays an important role in addressing today’s problems in novel ways.
“Writing this paper gave us the chance to step away from our technical roots and to highlight the fact that innovation is about more than technical breakthroughs,” Alcatel-Lucent said in the blog entry.
In the index chapter written by Alcatel-Lucent, public-private partnerships (PPP) and their relationship to innovation is examined. One example of PPP is the Living Cities project, an eco-sustainability project in the U.S. where local public organizations and private companies partner to revitalize urban areas.
One difference between the current situation of PPPs and the past is that information and communication technologies (ICT) are reinforcing and expanding these partnerships beyond previous limits.
This dovetails with the innovation work currently being done at Alcatel-Lucent, such as its GreenTouch consortium of industry experts and academics dedicated to pioneering innovation in eco-sustainability technology to achieve reductions in the energy consumption of ICT networks.
“Innovation in today’s societies is about collaboration, about forming the sometimes seemingly impossible linkages between companies, industries, and public institutions to address challenges and opportunities that reach far beyond the scope or capability of any individual organization,” Alcatel-Lucent said in its innovation blog. “This means also that the role of companies – like ours – is changing from providing just products and services to collaborative, innovative working with all sorts of players, including public and non-profit sectors.”
Alcatel-Lucent also helped with GII methodology, although it reports that introducing new and novel components to the index was more challenging than initially suspected.
“The difficult part was to find reliable and coherent data that could support the innovation indicators for over 140 countries,” Alcatel-Lucent said in its blog entry. “We recognized that the GII and related analysis cannot be built on shaky or incomplete data. Finding data for 140 countries to cover these indicators was, frankly, a bit of a nightmare. These are the kinds of challenges that only close, ongoing engagement with the process can reveal.”
This was the second year Alcatel-Lucent participated as a GII Knowledge Partner.
