Abstract This study advances the innovation literature by introducing and quantifying sustainable innovation efficiency at the country level. While prior research has primarily focused on innovation efficiency alone, we propose a novel framework that integrates both innovation efficiency and sustainable innovation efficiency to provide a more comprehensive measure of overall innovation performance. Using Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) on a sample of 30 countries from 2009 to 2018, we assess how effectively nations convert research and development (R&D) inputs into stable innovation outputs despite volatile inputs. Our findings reveal that overall innovation efficiency remains low, with scores consistently below 0.25, indicating substantial room for improvement. High-income countries outperform their upper-middle and lower-middle-income counterparts in sustainable innovation efficiency, whereas lower-middle-income countries exhibit the highest innovation efficiency. Geographically, East Asia and the Pacific outperform Europe, Central Asia, and the Middle East and North Africa in innovation efficiency, though variations exist in sustainable innovation efficiency. Our study is the first to conceptualize and empirically validate sustainable innovation efficiency, offering new insights into the long-term resilience and effectiveness of national innovation systems.
Tan et al. (Wed,) studied this question.
Synapse has enriched 5 closely related papers on similar clinical questions. Consider them for comparative context: