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Officials responsible for the Global Innovation Index GII ) caution against comparing performances of countries across the years too much. Indicators and situations change, they say, and conclusions drawn by such comparisons can be wrong sometimes.A close reading of indicators and the performance of countries in GII support this argument. But a historical analysis also shows certain patterns do not change. Ten years of GII data clearly reveal India is improving, but also that it is still some way from joining the big league of innovative nations.GII was first conceived and introduced in 2007 by Soumitra Dutta , then a professor at the Paris-based business school Insead. Now, the global rankings are done jointly by Insead, the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) in Geneva and Cornell University, where Dutta is now the dean of the SC Johnson School of Business.The Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) has been a partner right from the beginning. Over the years, GII has caught worldwide attention; used by governments to benchmark nations’ innovation capabilities. India has had a rollercoaster ride on the GII for the last six years.The rankings began in 2007, when the study was done only by Insead. In 2011, when WIPO joined the exercise, the model was changed substantially, making comparisons of previous years less relevant. India stood at 62 in 2011. Its rank kept going down over the years, and was at 81 in 2015.The country reversed the trend in the last two years. This year it came in at 60. The GII report calls India an innovation achiever in its economic class of low-middle income nations. India has remained an innovation achiever for the last seven years. Such rapid changes were seen in some other countries in the middle group of innovative nations, as policies and economies changed rapidly.Vietnam has had fluctuating fortunes, too; from 71 in 2014, it climbed to 47 this year after an up and down ride over four years. Ukraine improved steadily from 63 in 2014 to 50 this year. Top 10 nations have not changed. China improved steadily over the years and is at 22 now.India has shown some strengths in the last few years — its large base of science and engineering graduates, presence of global R&D companies, scale of domestic market and so on. India has improved its innovation efficiency, which means it is getting more out of its inputs. But it has some glaring weaknesses too— poor student-teacher ratio, poor business environment, poor environmental performance… “Innovation is like a chain,” says Dutta.“If there is a weak link, it shows up in the end.” According to GII data, India has several weak links. India has performed poorly in the business environment, where it ranks 121 among 127 countries. The rankings are higher than 100 in all three sub-categories of ease of starting business (114), ease of resolving insolvency (111), and ease of paying taxes (118).Ease of paying taxes will improve with rapid digitisation. There is enough reason to suppose the other two indicators will also improve over the years, as the government focuses on creating the right environment for innovation. “A lot of inputs for innovation can be influenced by policy,” says Rishikesha Krishnan, director of Indian Institute of Management in Indore. Some other indicators are difficult to improve, and will require big investments and visionary thinking. India is at rank 104 on pupil-teacher ratio, 102 on inbound mobility (overseas students) in colleges, and 108 on environmental performance.“Teachers are not available in large numbers,” says RA Mashelkar, national research professor and an advisor to GII. “It is hard for a large country like India to get a high pupil-student ratio.” The recent postponement of a plan to create world-class universities shows that the government is not too keen on foreign students in Indian universities. Dutta says GII cannot capture everything about a country, especially large nations like India.However, the big sets of data GII has accumulated over the years, all available to the public, narrates a powerful story in itself. Although India has some strong points such as the IT industry — India tops the global ranking for ICT exports — it has several glaring weaknesses in its infrastructure and education that will keep its innovation capabilities low for some time. “India has peaks of excellence,” says Dutta, “but there is more work to be done at many levels.”India’s jump in ranking can be explained partly by the presence of new indicators, and partly by improvement in quality of data from the country. For instance, last year, India did very well in three indicators — graduates in science and engineering, market scale, and average expenditure of global R&D companies.In 2015, there were no data from India on graduates in science and engineering. It was provided last year, and India came in at no. 8 in this category. Last year, the GII introduced a score for market scale and for average expenditure of top three R&D companies. India came in third for market scale and 20th for expenditure of global R&D companies. These three indicators had a big part to play in India’s improvement from rank 81 to 66 last year. India’s jump of six places this year appears more real, and not significantly influenced by new indicators.The new indicator in GII this year was the total value of stocks traded, and India is at rank 20 here. Like in the indicator of market size, the market capitalization of India’s listed stocks would have helped. Apart from this, the climb in this year’s ranking has mainly come from India’s relative position rather than absolute improvements. India’s continuous slip in the past was noticed by the policy-makers in the country, and they have made an effort to provide quality data to the GII. “India has been paying attention to data capture,” says Francis Gurry, director-general of WIPO.“It is a sign of real seriousness.” In fact, the government had conducted meetings with innovation experts in the country specifically on how to improve India’s GII rankings. The ministry of commerce and industry set up a taskforce on innovation, with the specific mandate to improve the innovation ecosystem in the country, and thereby improve the GII ranking.Last week, the taskforce published a report that looked at GII methodology and India’s performance in detail. It had objections to some methodology for indicators like political stability and business environment, but also accepted that India needed to improve education and research. The taskforce believes India, being a vibrant democracy, needs to be ranked higher than 113 out of 128 nations for political stability.Since business environment is assessed largely using a survey, whose respondents may not know the Indian situation well enough, the taskforce recommendation is to use government inputs as well for ranking. The government has constituted a committee to form its own innovation index, which is to be used to improve innovation capabilities. The GII report is not all about rankings, as it also has 81 indicators providing a wealth of information on innovation capability.“How a country moves up and down in rankings is meaningless,” says Naushad Forbes, co-chairman of Forbes Marshall, and a member of the committee constituted recently to develop the Indian Innovation Index. “We have to look at the qualitative indicators.” Forbes feels India does well in indicators of efficiency, but not so well where doing well requires high inputs.It is easy to reason from this and other recent developments where India will improve. It could provide a good indication of where India will stand in a decade or so. India’s environmental performance is also not likely to improve over the next decade significantly, as it battles inadequate regulation, poor implementation and lack of political will. These factors are likely to weigh India down, both in innovation capability and, by extension, economic growth.This year’s GII report notes declining world trends on growth of total investments and R&D expenditure. Investment growth dipped after 2008, picked up in 2010 and then slipped again. In 2015, they were at the same level as in 2005. R&D expenditure followed a similar pattern with a slight time lag, but haven’t returned to the levels of 2005. Although the GII report shows only global trends in R&D expenditures, India’s R&D expenditure has not been high in the last few years, and it could affect innovation capability in the long term.“Investments are not just for competitiveness,” says Dutta. “It is also about creating economic growth.” Innovation is known to be one of the best ways of creating economic growth, and stagnant growth in R&D investments can hit India hard in the long run.