Innovation 2.0--What's in your wallet?

• Author: Slaper, Timothy

Is your region innovative? How does your economic landscape compare to your peers?

The new Innovation Index 2.0 can help answer those and many other questions. The II 2.0 is a web resource that can give economic development practitioners and other regional leadership the ability to assess their economic strengths and challenges, in addition to their capacity for innovation.

"Innovation is the specific instrument of entrepreneurship. The act that endows resources with a new capacity to create wealth." --Peter Drucker The new II 2.0 is more comprehensive than the earlier innovation index. II 2.0 expands on the previous index by adding more than 50 new measures. Like the first version, these data are all at the county level and can be aggregated to a regional level based on the user's needs. These measures reflect contemporary research on understanding and measuring innovation. For example, II 2.0 includes measures that take into account regional knowledge spillovers, technology diffusion and foreign direct investment.

Both the II 2.0 and economic development related web tools that are available on StatsAmerica.org were developed and built by the Indiana Business Research Center (IBRC) at Indiana University with funding from the U.S. Economic Development Administration (EDA).

"The secret of change is to focus all of your energy, not on fighting the old, but on building the new." --Socrates The Innovation Index 2.0 provides a set of analytic tools and data that can help regional leaders reach a strong consensus on their region's strategic direction. Data and analysis can inform stakeholders' collective action toward a common vision and can guide complex decision-making at a regional-level by identifying region's capabilities, shortfalls and potential.

Data-driven regional development strategies require data and not all regions' economic development commissions or business associations can afford data and analysis from data vendors. The IBRC, thanks to the EDA, provides these data and resources at no cost to the user.

The tool is engineered for drilling down into detailed data as well as cross-regional analysis. Users can focus on a single area (Overview) or a multi-area comparison (Comparisons). A nationwide mapping widget allows you to see every county or region in a heat map style--even allowing the user to select a county or region as the "comparison...