Innovation performance has become increasingly important for governments as they search for ways to stimulate the economy and to address pressing societal challenges. Thus, in recent years a variety of innovation performance rankings have been developed to measure performance levels and benchmark them against other countries. Those are, hence, closely watched by policymakers and are frequently perceived as a neutral gauge of a country's innovation performance. Grupp and Schubert (2010) have pointed out that different weighting schemes can give rise to very different country rankings. They recommend complementing composite indicators by multidimensional representations of the issues leading to the performance in the aggregate indicator, i.e. explaining to policy makers why the performance arises. In this article, we sketch such a multidimensional framework.

Asymmetric international mobility of highly talented scientists is well documented. We contribute to the explanation of this phenomenon, looking at the "competitiveness" of research universities in terms of being able to attract talented early stage researchers. We propose a new hybrid quantitative-qualitative methodology for comparing the top tier of national higher education systems: We characterise a country's capability to offer attractive entry positions into academic careers building upon the results of a large scale experiment on the determinants of job choice in academia, using a mix of data and expert-based assessment. We examine salary level, quality of life, career perspectives, research organisation, balance between teaching and research, funding and the probability of working with high quality peers. Our results in the form of a job attractiveness index indicate that overall, the US research universities offer the most attractive jobs for early stage researchers, consistent with the asymmetric flow of talented scientists to the USA. By comparison with rankings that use survey results or bibliometric data, our methodology offers the advantage of comparing structures and factors shaping the process of research rather than results of research. The findings are hence directly relevant for policies aiming at improving the attractiveness of research universities.

In October 2013, the European Commission presented a new indicator intended to capture innovation outputs and outcomes and thereby "support policy-makers in establishing new or reinforced actions to remove bottlenecks that prevent innovators from translating ideas into products and services that can be successful on the market". This article aims to evaluate the usefulness of the new indicator against the background of the difficulties in measuring innovation outputs and outcomes. We develop a unique conceptual framework for measuring innovation outcomes that distinguishes structural change and structural upgrading as two key dimensions in both manufacturing and services. We conclude that the new indicator is biased towards a somewhat narrowly defined "high-tech" understanding of innovation outcomes. We illustrate our framework proposing a broader set of outcome indicators capturing also structural upgrading. We find that the results for the modified indicator differ substantially for a number of countries, with potentially wide-ranging consequences for innovation and industrial policies.

For a newspaper article based on the research article, see Jürgen Janger, Klaus Nowotny, "Job choice is about more than colleagues and money", Research Europe, 28th July 2016, p. 8.