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” (Chen, 2014). 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.

Innovation and Entrepreneurship: A National Viewpoint

The case of Taiwan is particularly interesting, as GDP per capita has increased more than twentyfold since 1960 (International Monetary Fund, 2012). In 2009-2013, Taiwan ranked 6th in the Global Innovation Index and ranked 1st in the Geneva International Exhibition of Invention and INPEX (Dutta & Lanvin, 2013). The technology has been growing fast in Taiwan, and it plays a critical role in economic transformation with the strength in the development of a “knowledge-intensive industry.” Taiwan industries are transforming themselves from high-efficiency mass production, like manufacturing industry, to application innovation for products, systems, and services. High-tech industry plays an important role in Taiwan, as its small size and limited range of industries make it suitable for technological advancement. The lands that high technology need are much smaller, making it suitable for Taiwan.

A report from the Ministry of Economic Affairs (2006) highlighted that businesses and enterprises occupy the highest proportion (67.15% in 2006) of R&D funding, followed by government apparatus (31.41%). This indicates that the role played by businesses and enterprises is becoming increasingly important. High tech is one of the new industries in the 21st century, requiring many new ideas for development. This explains why innovation was 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 (Chang, 2013). Although I didn’t have the latest rank of the Global Innovation Index for Taiwan, the government in our country still attaches importance to innovation and entrepreneurship. The government set up the Taiwan Innovation and Entrepreneurship Center to provide resources to make ideas come true and the platform for investors and startup teams to exchange ideas and know each other. Recently, Taiwan has used its formidable technology and engineering talent to focus on virtual reality, robotics, artificial intelligence, the internet of things, smart healthcare, smart logistics, smart machinery, green energy, and smart cities, among others (Lin, 2018).

Comparison with Hong Kong

In comparison with Hong Kong, which ranked 16th in 2017, Taiwan has utilized its engineering expertise to enter software and hardware technology, while Hong Kong has become a world financial and shipping center (World Intellectual Property Organization, 2017). The role of innovation in their country is that it will diversify economic growth and offer new quality jobs. The next step for Hong Kong is to develop the future of information and communications technology.

Conclusion

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, the quality of infrastructure, and the education level of the labor force. 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. A high education level will make society more innovative than others. Additionally, innovation performance is evaluated based on the quantity of patents issued by the patent offices of Europe, Japan, and the U.S.A. This means that people are more creative and can find new solutions for the problems they meet (Porter & Stern, 2001).