Innovation is known as the creation, development and implementation of a new product, process or service, with the aim of improving efficiency, effectiveness or competitive advantage. Innovation can promote economic growth and social and cultural well-being. Prioritizing innovation today is the key to unlocking postcrisis growth. The importance of innovation comes to perspective in times of crisis such as the COVID-19 pandemic that has upended nearly every aspect of life. As Innovation drives productivity there comes a need to know what works, what doesn’t and why – and that means turning to measurements and metrics. Innovation metrics allows to observe the volume and direction of activities and more specifically right kind of performing activities that are capable to achieve the goals.
VTT has compiled an internationally unique, longitudinal database that provides micro-level insight into the wider processes of industrial renewal and technological change through individual innovations and innovation processes in Finnish businesses. SFINNO® is one of the most extensive and detailed longitudinal databases of product, service and process innovations in the world, and was designed at its inception to track industrial renewal by documenting the significant innovations of Finnish businesses from across the broader spectrum of the Finnish economy. Its purpose is to facilitate academic and policy research on innovation and entrepreneurship. Our database currently spans several thousand significant and unique, human identified innovations from Finland-based enterprises, which have been commercialized between 1985 to 2020.[1]
The SFINNO data has been compiled using a combination of three complementary methodologies for the identification of innovations: expert opinion, reviews of trade and technical journals, and reviews of the annual reports of large firms. The data collection has been done systematically in form of reviewing technical and trade journals during 1985-2020. The reviewing process, innovation detection and evaluation has been handled via a trained staff effort for the period of data collection. Literature-based reviews were accompanied by expert opinion for identification of innovations and multiple rounds of data validity have been placed to assure the accuracy and representativeness of the data. The method used in SFINNO for measurement of significant innovation output is called literature innovation-based innovation output (LBIO) in scientific discourse. LBIO methodology emphasis on gathering information on cases of innovation from relevant technical journals since they serve as a significant communication channel regarding new innovations in the sector. SFINNO still continues to expand as we continue to collect new data on Finnish innovations. On top of this, we also collect additional information from the innovators via a questionnaire instrument.
Over the years, our database has grown from a simple spreadsheet into a full-fledged relational database which is envisioned as a core part of the Quantitative Science and Technology team’s data analysis infrastructure for our research on Finnish science, technology and innovation (STI). Our latest effort has visualized the data where the embedded interactivity makes it possible to interact with data in a simplest way. We recognize the effort of communicating the data continues and our planning is to produce more insight from the data overtime while compliant with sensitivity of the data and GDPR regulations. This release contains the following views:
– The summary of innovations, their amount and type per year
– Location of innovations on the map. Where innovation is happening.
– Nature of innovations and the degree of their novelties from firm and market perspective.
– Technological know-how involved in the development of the innovation in different time periods
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[1] There is also a separate historical part of the dataset (1600 innovations) which spans the years 1945 to 1984.