Abstract
Innovation is important for countries in the competitive global economy. It is one of the main criteria for countries to be superior, to remain competitive, and to produce high technology products. Countries allocate different types of incentives to encourage innovation activities in their countries. Innovation is also one of the strategic issues for the European Union (EU). The aim of this study is to compare the innovation performance of four EU candidate countries, Macedonia (FYR), Iceland, Serbia and Turkey. The entropy-based Technique for Order Performance by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) approach is proposed in this paper. First, the importance of each variable is computed by the entropy method to reflect on the differences among the variables in the calculation process. Subsequently, the TOPSIS method is performed by using the value and importance of variables for prioritisation of the candidate countries with respect to their innovation performance. Four case studies are conducted to show the viability of the proposed approach. Each cases study uses different reports, namely The Global Competitiveness Index, Innovation Union Scoreboard, Knowledge Assessment Methodology (KAM) and Global Innovation Index. The results of this study show that the proposed approach provides the same ranking as Innovation Union Scoreboard and KAM.
Highlights
Innovation provides economic growth for a country, region or enterprise (Paas & Poltimäe, 2010)
There is no doubt that the effect of innovation on economic grow positively enhances the competitive power of countries in the present knowledge-based economy
In addition to the above studies, the following are examined in the literature: the impact of institutional quality on regional innovation performance of European Union (EU) countries (Laboutkova, 2013); innovation policies in the context of knowledge-based economy for three EU member states, Bulgaria, Finland and the UK (Galabova, 2012); the role of innovation in the technological development of four new members of the EU, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia through using the data obtained from the OECD and Eurostat (Uzagalieva, Kočenda, & Menezes, 2012); the impact of innovations on regional development in the EU (Vaidere, 2011); and the factors influencing innovation performance in new EU member countries, in the Czech Republic (Müller, 2006)
Summary
Innovation provides economic growth for a country, region or enterprise (Paas & Poltimäe, 2010). In order to cope with this paradox, the importance of innovation-driven development for countries appears due to the fact that innovation provides both higher growing ratio and lowers current account deficit simultaneously in the country. There are more studies related to EU membership for Turkey than other countries because of the fact that Turkey is the oldest candidate country among the other three, namely Iceland, Serbia and Macedonia Among these studies, details on the future of Turkey in the EU are discussed in Güney (2005). EU membership for Macedonia has a special property in terms of economy These four countries are ranked by the proposed approach with respect to their innovation performance in this article. A discussion and recommendations are provided in Section 5 and Section 6 concludes
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