Labor economist Richard Freeman to liken innovation to GDP at AAAS in June

Leading labor economist Dr. Richard Freeman will liken a new way of measuring innovation to GDP during his keynote address at a STEM measurement workshop in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday 6 June.

Held at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, "STEM Enterprise: Measures for Innovation and Competitiveness," is designed to measure the impact and effectiveness of all public, private and academic money spent on research and development in the STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) area.

Workshop sessions will focus on four main areas: funding, workforce, output measures and indicators, and policy implications. For more information on the all-day event and to register, see http://www.ieeeusa.org/calendar/conferences/stem/default.asp.

Freeman, a Harvard University professor, contends that the usual methods of assessing innovation, e.g. R&D spending or number of patents granted, are not true measures of innovation, which he defines as "the creation of improved goods or services, or modes of production that are brought to the marketplace for sale or delivery to consumers, firms or the government."

According to Freeman, the absence of a general quantitative measure of innovation "mars our ability to analyze the magnitude and direction of innovation and to develop policies to encourage it. I describe a new way of putting together a genuine measure and database of innovations, based on Web-scraping product announcements and lists of top innovations from various industry and other sources that would be the innovation equivalent of GDP [gross domestic product].

"I argue that this is the next key step in social measurement necessary for us to understand the new economics of a knowledge-based economy. I will also talk about some related innovative uses of Internet-based data to produce 'leading indicators' of the direction of science and innovation."

Provided by IEEE-USA