Sweden at the Innovation Frontier - Assessing Performance and Challenges in a Disruptive World

The paper assesses the innovative performance and challenges that a small innovative country like Sweden faces in an era of intense global competition. We contrast innovative performance with similar countries in Europe as well as discus the reliability and validity of indicators used to shape policy development. The conclusion from the analysis shows that available input-output indicators must be used with some caution. Even if the supply and quality of indicators has increased for policy analysis, they still lack precision and validity to make broad claims about the innovative performance of companies and nations. It is argued that understanding knowledge flows (rather than simple input-output metrics) are a key to understand innovation processes for small countries at the innovation frontier; subsequently, small countries will have to abandon failed policy orthodoxies in order to cope with future policy challenges.