The Oslo Manual was published by the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development and concerns itself with The Measurement of Scientific and Technological Activities. They are a set of proposed guidelines for collecting and interpreting technological innovation data written for and by experts. The scope of the manual is having a set of terms that can be used to understand innovation indicators within market analysis as well as a number of guidelines that can be enacted in order to obtain meaningful indicators of technologically improved process or product (TPP) innovation. TPP innovations are defined as those which require an objective improvement in the performance of a product or service. The manual continues on to address issues related to data collection and survey methods and also puts into context this particular manual with other families of manuals; other methods used for obtaining data or defining it and other means of surveying that can be used. I’m going to provide below a brief overview of some of the elements of the manual, but given it’s technically it really ought to be read from front to back in order to understand the full OECD approach to collecting, classifying and analyzing innovation data and other indicators of TPP innovation. In a vast oversimplification of what the manual covers – it could be said to be mainly concerned with:
• What is to be measured?
• How should it be measured?
• Where should it be measured?
• What do the measurements mean?
Science, Technology and Innovation policies emerged in part from the context of the Second World War. Ironically enough, American businesses starting to apply some of the sectoral economic policies of the Soviets after witnessing how quickly they were able to industrialize their economy. As one of the primary means that States saw a means for obtaining economic prosperity in the new post-war liberal international order was innovation, the social sciences started to analyze what would soon become a new field of research. The manual isn’t concerned with situating itself with this historical framework – other readings that I’ve been doing have done that – but I think it’s important to understand that it’s a collective product demonstrating the growing recognition of the imperative for businesses to innovate and the concern as to how to stay innovative in a global marketplace wherein there are many more options to reach the strategic goal of satisfying an identified market demand.
Because of this dynamic TPP transfer factors are a major concern of the manual. Transfer factors include linkages between firms, the presence of expert technological gatekeepers within a firm; international links; the degree of mobility and authority of expert technologists; the easy of industry access to public research and development programs; spin-off company formation; ethics, community value systems, trust and openness within a network; as well as codified knowledge in the form of patents, the specialized press and scientific journals. This complex system of interlocking factors that helps determine innovation at the firm level is called the “innovation dynamo”. Obstacles – such as skill shortages, problems of competence, financial issues, or appropriation – can have huge impacts not only on firms, but on policy as well. For instance, a policy might be created in order to assist a specific economic sector, say software as as service (SaaS). If the predicate on which it is built (i.e. there are a sufficient number of workers with a specific skill set) is not sound – it could lead to policies that harm rather than hurt that sector.
TPP innovation activities have three possible endings. They are either implemented successfully in order to create a new or technologically improves process or product, aborted for some reason, or are ongoing in their implementation. They are either endogenous (internal) to the firm or they are exogenous (external) to the firm.
How to collect, i.e. via a subject or object approach, is examined; as is how to distinguish between something that is versus is not a TPP innovation; how to prototype experiments; the relationship between OECD’s unites and that of the International Standard Industrial Classification of all Economic Activities (ISIC) and the European Community (NACE) in relationship to understanding international surveys; how to properly structure and distribute surveys; how to map the diffusion of innovation; breakdowns on types of innovation; how to distinguish between general expenditure for process improvement and those that classify as TPP; and procedures.
In short, it’s very technical reading about a specific topic. Does this have a relationship to the research you’re doing? Well then, read the bloody manual.