Rethinking science and technology indicators for innovation policy in the twenty-first century

It has long been understood that the generation and exploitation of knowledge are fundamental to economic growth. The widespread diffusion of new information technologies in the 1990s vastly improved the capability of generating, manipulating and distilling information so that it becomes knowledge, bringing the issue of how knowledge is created, nurtured and used for competitive advantage to the fore. This interest has been further fuelled by changes in the demographic mix of the labour force in many Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries, which place limits on increasing the size of the labour force as a potential source of growth, as well as by the emergence of skilled and lower-paid competitors from China and India, which creates new challenges for OECD countries, particularly with regard to innovation-driven activities.