Measuring Innovation and Innovation Activities Using Non-Survey Data Sources

The National Science Foundation’s (NSF) National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics (NCSES) is exploring opportunities to develop new ways to measure innovation, STEM (Science Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) pathways, and outputs in the economy not traditionally measured in official statistics, such as open source software. NCSES would like to understand the opportunities in natural data flows to supplement or enhance its current efforts in providing science and engineering indicators. Working collaboratively with the Social and Decision Analytics Laboratory in the Biocomplexity Institute of Virginia Tech, NCSES is exploring the identification and collection of data that naturally exists for other reasons and repurposing these data to measure innovation and related concepts.