You Want Another Index? Here We Go with INNOVATION!

By Renard Teipelke

There is probably no index missing in the profession (and obsession) of ranking cities. One index that was recently mentioned in the UN-Habitat State of the World Cities Report 2012/2013 is the Innovation Cities Index.

2thinknow, the company behind this index, advertises it as the “world’s largest city classification and ranking with 331 benchmark cities classified”. Cities are ranked globally and per region and are classified as “nexus”, “hub”, “node”, “influencer”, or “upstart” – basically ascribing to cities a higher to lower degree of importance/relevance with regard to ‘innovation’; with “nexus” cities (such as Boston, Vienna, Munich, Copenhagen, Hong Kong, or Seoul) at the top as being the crucial centers for multiple social and economic innovation sectors, and “upstart” cities (such as Jakarta, Kolkata, Johannesburg, Karachi, Manama, or Lima) at the bottom as having potentially some innovative sectors in the future.

GLOBAL RANK	CITY	COUNTRY	CLASSIFI-CATION
1	Boston	United States	1 NEXUS
2	San Francisco Bay Area	United States	1 NEXUS
3	Paris	France	1 NEXUS
4	New York	United States	1 NEXUS
5	Vienna	Austria	1 NEXUS
6	Amsterdam	Netherlands	1 NEXUS
7	Munich	Germany	1 NEXUS
8	Lyon	France	1 NEXUS
9	Copenhagen	Denmark	1 NEXUS
10	Toronto	Canada	1 NEXUS
11	London	United Kingdom	1 NEXUS
12	Frankfurt	Germany	1 NEXUS
13	Hamburg	Germany	1 NEXUS
14	Berlin	Germany	1 NEXUS
15	Hong Kong	Hong Kong	1 NEXUS
16	Milan	Italy	1 NEXUS
17	Melbourne	Australia	1 NEXUS
18	Stuttgart	Germany	1 NEXUS
19	Barcelona	Spain	1 NEXUS
20	Sydney	Australia	1 NEXUS
21	Stockholm	Sweden	1 NEXUS
22	Tokyo	Japan	1 NEXUS
23	Rome	Italy	1 NEXUS
24	Shanghai	China	1 NEXUS
25	Seattle	United States	1 NEXUS
26	Singapore	Singapore	1 NEXUS
27	Strasbourg	France	1 NEXUS
28	Seoul	Korea, South	1 NEXUS
29	Los Angeles	United States	1 NEXUS
30	Kyoto	Japan	1 NEXUS

Place 1 to 30 in the global innovation cities ranking 2011

I do not want to go into the methodological details of the index, but 2thinknow has definitely put effort into designing what they call the “most comprehensive city ranking and scoring”. Besides general characteristics for cities (demographics, geography, health, wealth, etc.), the cities are analyzed based on benchmarking indicators that are cross-checked with qualitative and quantitative data. Eventually the data is compared to global trends and a “zeitgeist (analyst confidence) factor” is added, with cultural assets, human infrastructure, and networked markets factors included. Sounds sophisticated and I do not feel enough qualified to judge about the scientific rigor of the index.

A look at the tables reveal a somewhat different ranking of cities in comparison to other rankings (such as for GDP, creativity, or liveability). For some cities, one can find this index as a ‘proof’ that they will not lose ground in competition with so called global cities (this might be especially true for European cities). For other cities, one can understand with the help of this index, why they have been so ‘successful’ in the past (and probably also in the future) even though they are not necessarily liveable or world-famous (such as Manchester, Marseille, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Karlsruhe, Dortmund, or Reims).

Infomodel by Jess Hadden: How Innovative Cities are formed and function (adapted from Richard Florida’s 2005 book Cities and the Creative Class)

So what do we do with the Innovation Index now? Add it to our long list of fancy indices and rankings? Be happy that our home town finally showed up in the top 100? Ask what ‘innovation’ means, how it can be differentiated from creativity, economic progress, and alternativeness? Probably no one would doubt that ‘innovation’ is important to a city’s vitality and prosperous future. The question then would be: How can cities (i.e. public, private, and civil-society actors) produce, support, and trigger innovation? Answers to this question can be purchased as innovation services from 2thinknow 😉