The Costa Rica News (TCRN) – According to the Global Innovation Index of 2013, Costa Rica has taken the 39th place on the global innovation ranking and it’s the first country in Latin America to appear in the list. The study was published by INSEAD (European Institute of Business Administration), WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organization) and the University of Cornell.
The report, that includes 142 countries around the globe, ranks the innovation performance based on 84 indicators like political and business environment, human capital, education, infrastructure of ICT’s (Information and Communication Technologies), market sophistication, investment and knowledge creation and diffusion.
Costa Rica is the second country with the largest increase in the ranking (behind Uganda), having climbed 21 positions since last year. Also, it’s the top performer in the region of Latin America and the Caribbean, ahead of Chile and Barbados. The world’s top 5 innovators are Switzerland, Sweden, United Kingdom, Netherlands and United States of America.
This index allows each country to evaluate their situation and identify their strenghts and weaknesses (See “Strenghts and Weaknesses”). Costa Rica, for example, is very well positioned on business density, high tech exports and imports and knowledge diffusion but not so well on investment, engineering students and market capitalization.
Alejandro Cruz the Minister of Science, Technology and Telecommunications, said that “Costa Rica has made significant progress in the articulation of the academic, governmental and productive sectors. The improvement in the rate of innovation is a clear sign that Costa Rica is moving to become a knowledge economy fully integrated with international markets… this administration is taking care of significant challenges that still exist in the area of human capital and infrastructure, so it is expected that the positions occupied by the country in future editions will be even better “.
This study is published since 2007, and has become the main instrument to measure the innovative capacity of the countries around the world.
STRENGTHS AND WEAKNESSES.
What are Costa Rica advantages? What aspects should the government put more focus on?
Source: https://www.globalinnovationindex.org/content/page/GII-Home
Eladio Montero Porras
The Costa Rica News (TCRN)
San Jose Costa Rica
