Innovation and Entrepreneurship – a National Perspective

“Several things have driven Taiwan’s innovation success, including: targeted public R&D funding, successful integration into global supply chains, and the development of a knowledge-based economy”. This is the description of Taiwan. However, I couldn’t find my country in that website. It’s hard for me to find out the latest index in any places, all of them did not have a recent data of Taiwan. The only one I can find out is Global Innovation Index 2009-2013. Therefore, I choose Hong Kong, just near to Taiwan, to compare and describe the role of innovation and entrepreneurship in both countries, and some situations of innovation that I knew in Taiwan.

The case of Taiwan is particularly interesting, as GDP per capita has increased more than twentyfold since 1960 (IMF, 2012).

In 2009-2013, Taiwan ranked 6th in Global Innovation Index, and ranked 1st in Geneva International Exhibition of Invention and INPEX. The technology has been growing fast in Taiwan, and it plays a critical role to economic transformation with the strength in the development of “knowledge-intensive industry”. Taiwan industries are transforming themselves from the high-efficiency mass production, like manufacturing industry, to application innovation for products, system and service. High tech industry is playing important roles in Taiwan, because Taiwan is really small when we compared to other countries and range of industries more narrow. And, the lands that high technology need is much smaller. Therefore, it is suitable for Taiwan. The report said that because of the source of Research and development fund, the businesses and enterprises occupy the highest proportion (67.15% in 2006) and then the government apparatus (31.41%). It displays that the role played by the businesses and enterprises is becoming more and more important. High tech is the one of new industry in 21 century, so it need lot of new ideas to develop it. I think that why innovation is very popular at that time in Taiwan. Some statistics can prove this opinion, In Taiwan, 268 U.S. invention patents may be obtained per one million people. Such performance is ahead of the U.S.A. and Japan and ranks 1st in the world. Although that I didn’t have the latest rank of Global Innovation Index of Taiwan, the government in our country still attach importance to innovation and entrepreneurship. The government set up Taiwan Innovation and Entrepreneurship Center to provide the resources to make your idea come true and the platform for investors and startup teams to exchange ideas and know each other. Recently, Taiwan use its formidable technology and engineering talent to focus on virtual reality, robotics, artificial intelligence, internet of things, smart healthcare, smart logistics, smart machinery, green energy, and smart cities… etc.

To compare with Hong Kong, ranked 16th in 2017, Taiwan used its engineering expertise to enter software and hardware technology, while Hong Kong becomes a world financial, shipping center. The role of innovation plays in their country is that it will diversify economic growth and offer new quality jobs. The next step for Hong Kong’s is to develop the future of information and communications technology.

The rankings were based on the various countries’ innovation investment and performance. The innovation investment includes the proportion of Research and Development investment in GDP, quality of infrastructure and education level of the labor force. The education is mainly one of the factors of people’s productivity and efficiency. Here, efficiency means the balance between resources invested and the outcomes in terms of students’ performance and equity. High education level will make the society more innovative than others. Additionally, the innovation performance is evaluated based on the quantity of patents issued by the patent offices of Europe, Japan and the U.S.A. That mean that people are more creative to have some new solutions for the problems they meet.