Measuring innovation is a challenging task, both for researchers and for
national statisticians, and it is increasingly important in light of the
ongoing digital revolution. National accounts and many other economic
statistics were designed before the emergence of the digital economy and
the growth in importance of intangible capital. They do not yet fully
capture the wide range of innovative activity that is observed in modern
economies. This volume examines how to measure innovation, track its
effects on economic activity and on prices, and understand how it has
changed the structure of production processes, labor markets, and
organizational form and operation in business. The contributors explore
new approaches to and data sources for measurement, such as collecting
data for a particular innovation as opposed to a firm and using
trademarks for tracking innovation. They also consider the connections
between university-based R&D and business start-ups and the potential
impacts of innovation on income distribution. The research suggests
strategies for expanding current measurement frameworks to better
capture innovative activity, including developing more detailed tracking
of global value chains to identify innovation across time and space and
expanding the measurement of innovation's impacts on GDP in fields such
as consumer content delivery and cloud computing.
