Academic research in innovation: a country analysis

© 2016, Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest, Hungary. Many countries are investing a lot in innovation in order to modernize their economies. A key step in this process is the development of academic research in innovation. This article analyzes the leading countries in innovation research between 1989 and 2013 from an academic perspective. The aim of the study is to identify the most relevant countries in this field and the leading trends that are occurring during the last years. The work also introduces a general perspective analyzing the research developed in several supranational regions. The main advantage of this contribution is that it gives a global overview of the current academic state of the art in the area. The analysis focuses on the most productive and influential countries in innovation research classifying the results in periods of 5 years. The leading journals in the field are also studied individually identifying the most productive countries in each of the journals. The results show that the publications of each country are biased by the country origin of the journal. The USA and the UK are the leading countries in this field being the UK the most productive one in per capita terms among the big countries.