Measuring the territorial effort in research, development, and innovation from a multiple criteria approach: Application to the Spanish regions case

Research, development and innovation are fundamental for the socioeconomic growth of the territories. Consequently, many governments set spending targets for research and development (R&D), for example the EU has a goal of reaching a spending target of 3% of the Union's GDP. However, recent literature emphasizes that spending on R&D may not be the most appropriate indicator to measure the innovative efforts of a particular territory. Multidimensional indicators are required to measure the different elements that reflect the capacity of each scientific and innovative system to transmit the scientific results into productivity and competitiveness advancements. In this context, the objective of this paper is to propose a method that produces a synthetic indicator to rank various territories as an aid to understanding the multidimensional complexities of the innovation process. To reach this objective, the methodological approach proposed is a modified version of the unweighted TOPSIS (UW-TOPSIS) method. In this paper, this multiple criteria decision-making method is used to rank the 17 Spanish autonomous communities in terms of their innovation efforts. The obtained results show the capacity of the proposed technique to evaluate the relative situation of each community using a multidimensional approach. However, it also allows us to provide policy guidance to political decision-makers on socioeconomic aspects that can be improved in each region. •The objective of this paper is to propose a procedure that allows to have a synthetic indicator with which to make a ranking of territories helping to understand the multidimensional complexity of the innovative process.•The proposed method applies an aggregation procedure that does not require the a priori set of the relative importance of the decision criteria.•The method allows us to identify the main weaknesses and strengths of the alternatives in terms of their position in the ranking.