Innovative advantages ranking : a new approach

Assessing/ranking the innovative advantages of countries is a problem of current interest. However, the set of tools used for this purpose are very narrow and often prone to criticism. The aim of this study is to somewhat extend the arsenal of methods used to this end. For this purpose, based on a data set from the Global Innovation Index, this study develops a special multi-objective decision-making problem, the aim of which is to identify the “best countries” in the sense of their innovative advantage. Moreover, applying ranking methods (in our case the Markov-chain method and analytic hierarchy process) to this multi-objective decision-making problem, we obtain new alternative ratings/rankings of the innovative advantages of countries.