Three Years of Biotech Tracking

As an index begins to mature, it enables us to explore the question: What is changing? Using Scientific American Worldview’s overall innovation index, now three years old, we can start looking for such changes. Specifically, we can examine where innovation capacity is growing or where it may be faltering.

To facilitate this examination, we normalized the overall innovation scores, from lowest to highest, to a range of 0–10. The results for data from 2009, 2010 and 2011 reveal how one country changed relative to itself and others. Likewise, these data show the expanding list of countries assessed, some of which lack data for every year.

The U.S. has maintained its top spot throughout—earning scores that far surpassed most countries. Other nations started out in our list as strong contenders, but have already started to slip. The most notable drop comes from Singapore. It made a close run for second against the U.S. in our 2009 index, but dropped in 2010, although holding onto the second spot. A further drop in 2011, however, pushed Singapore to eighth on the overall innovation index. In part, Singapore moved down on the list because other countries improved. For example, Denmark moved from an overall score of 27 in 2010 to 31.85 in 2011. By comparison, Singapore dropped from an overall score of 31 in 2010 to 27.90 in 2011. For the most part, that drop in Singapore’s overall score came from the Education/Workforce category, in which it scored 5.94 in 2010 but only 3.00 in 2011. In addition, Singapore’s score for Foundations changed from 7.73 in 2010 to 7.09 in 2011. As the biotechnology innovation capacity around the world increases, even slight declines will push countries farther down the list.

On the other hand, some of the most notable gains come from a pair of neighboring countries, Portugal and Spain. Both countries show steady climbs in their overall innovation scores for 2009 through 2011. In fact, based on the normalized data, Portugal’s performance more than doubled from 2009 to 2011. From 2010 to 2011, Portugal earned higher scores for Enterprise Support, Education/Workforce and Foundations. For example, its score for Education/Workforce increased by nearly 40 percent. Such rises offset its small drop in Intensity. Spain saw its scores for Intensity and Foundations increase by 28 and 8 percent, respectively, between 2010 and 2011. It also showed small gains in Intensity and Education/Workforce.

Signs of consistent growth also appear in the scores of other countries, including Finland, Germany, Italy, Mexico, Sweden and the Czech Republic. As our database grows, more sophisticated forms of analysis will become possible. For instance, we look forward to watching the numbers for the list’s new countries, as well as to looking for ongoing trends in countries on the list from the start. This analysis will help nations gauge their own progress as innovators. Moreover, trends on the overall innovation scores can be traced to specific changes in the category data.