The influence of bottlenecks on innovation systems performance: Put the slowest climber first
提出一种识别创新系统中制约整体绩效的瓶颈的方法，利用惩罚瓶颈概念和生产率创新指数，基于2021年欧洲创新记分牌数据，展示如何通过缓解瓶颈提升系统绩效，为政策制定者提供干预方向。
This paper contributes to the literature with a methodology that helps identify the functions that constrain the overall performance of an innovation system, hence providing clear guidelines to policymakers on the direction of their interventions. This methodology relies on the notion of penalty for bottleneck, which is defined as the weakest link or the binding constraint that holds back system performance. These penalty bottlenecks are applied to all the indicators that characterize innovation systems, and consider its input-output mix when assessing their performance through a Productivity Innovation Index. The data provided by the 2021 edition of the European Innovation Scoreboard are used to illustrate the utility of the method introduced in the paper. We first identify the input and output bottlenecks for every country. Second, we report the productivity loss due to the existence of these bottlenecks. Third, we evidence the responsiveness of the Productivity Innovation Index to bottleneck alleviation, from three different perspectives: (i) application of a 10 % alleviation to the input bottleneck; (ii) application of a 10 % alleviation to the output bottleneck; and (iii) application of a 5 % alleviation to both the input and output bottlenecks, respectively.