An Innovation Scoreboard for MENA Countries

The ESCWA Technology Centre (ETC) co-organized the meeting on “Establishing Innovation Scoreboard for Middle East and North Africa Countries” in cooperation with Islamic Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (ISESCO) and the European Investment Bank (EIB) in Rabat on 16-17 May 2016.

This workshop followed an earlier meeting in Amman (March 2015), where participating countries selected 25 statistical indicators for an Innovation Scoreboard, to assess the innovation capacity and innovative status of countries in the MENA-region. The meeting in Rabat was set up to evaluate the data availability for the selected indicators and, in function of the data availability, discuss the pertinence of the selected framework to measure input, processes and output and impact of national innovation systems.

 The delegates agreed on the finalization of the raw data worksheet, collecting national data on Research and Development (R&D) expenditures, the number of scientists and R&D staff, providing data on the national Private Equity and Venture Capital markets, conducting national enterprise surveys on innovation behaviour, and translating the Scoreboard into Arabic.