Abstract

　　The national innovation capacity (NIC) has received increasingly more attention from academia and policy makers. This study develops a methodology for measuring NIC with a view to provide the evidence for policy-making concerning national innovation capacity-building, and conducts a cross-country comparison based on the panel data of 2006-2015. (1) National innovation capacity index (NICI) is established to measure the performance of NIC from two perspectives, namely national innovation strength index (NISI) and national innovation effectiveness index (NIEI). (2) Developed countries usually perform better than developing countries in terms of the NICI if there is no huge gap in economic scale between two kinds of countries. (3) Emerging countries show greater imbalance between the NISI and the NIEI, and have generally higher average annual growth rate of the NISI and the NIEI than that of developed countries. (4) National innovation strength is closely related to national economic scale while national innovation effectiveness is closely related to national development level. Some theoretical considerations in this research may make contributions to innovation development studies. (1) NIC is regarded as the capacity for scientific discovery and technology invention, and for driving economic, social and environmental development, which emphasizes the driving effect and the influence of innovation on development. (2) The concepts such as the NISI and the NIEI are introduced to measure the NIC so as to distinguish the contribution of the size of innovation activities to the NIC and the contribution of the efficiency and efficacy of innovation-driven development to the NIC. (3) The indicator system of the NICI is designed from the perspective of the full spectrum of capacity-building process ranging from input to output by introducing the “innovation condition” as a broad sense “innovation input” and the “innovation outcome” as a broad sense “innovation output”.