Competitiveness and Innovation Measurement

The Business Unit is coordinated by Dr. Peter Neuhäusler.

The Business Unit Competitiveness and Innovation Measurement focuses on the analysis of innovation systems. Our main emphasis is on examining the technological performance of fields, countries, and markets. We apply established indicators as well as new types of data access and advanced methods in data science to illustrate relevant aspects of innovation activities and success in national economies or industries.

Our focus is on continuously reassessing Germany's and Europe's international position in the global innovation environment and identifying development dynamics and corresponding opportunities for action. Analyzing intellectual property rights (IPR) is a central component in our range of methods. Besides patents as a key indicator, we also focus on other indicators such as trademarks. Analyzing company dynamics also plays an important role in this context.

Our portfolio is flanked by economic impact analyses and analyses of innovation demand, where we contribute to the ongoing discussion with new measurement concepts and the development of indicators. We use patent-, foreign trade- and company statistics as well as the complementary evaluation of secondary statistics to develop topic-specific composite indicators.

We are able to conduct analyses at the interfaces of existing databases and link them with topic-specific complementary data sources. In addition, we develop novel measurement methods based on unstructured data (big data, text mining and web scraping) to answer new questions and obtain insights into the functions and mechanisms of innovation systems.