Lorena also formulates country-specific innovation policy recommendations and participates in related country missions and dissemination events following the GII annual rankings. She lives in a small French village just next to Geneva, Switzerland. She is Mexican by birth, Belgian by heart and loves Sweden thanks to her kids and husband. She enjoys listening to a good podcast or audiobook, and in her free time, she loves running in the countryside and cooking vegan food.

In short, how do you define innovation?

Innovation is about making things differently, creating and implementing new ideas, products or methods that can bring significant positive change to society.

What’s the story behind the creation of the Global Innovation Index?

The GII was created in 2007 to provide a comprehensive framework to measure and rank countries' innovation performance worldwide. The main idea was to go beyond traditional measures of innovation, such as research and development spending, and to include a broader range of factors, such as the quality of human capital, the strength and quality of institutions, the level of market and business sophistication and even softer measures such as creativity and intangible assets.  Nowadays, the GII is a widely recognised tool for policymakers, academics and businesses to benchmark and track innovation progress across countries and regions and to identify areas where improvements are needed to support innovation and drive economic growth.

What kind of reactions do you get to the Global Innovation Index? Was there a particular one that struck you?

Each year, we receive numerous reactions from policymakers in response to the publication of the GII. While many of these reactions relate to how we can improve innovation measurement, we are also seeing an increasing number from the general public. Recently, a high-school professor in India reached out to us after one of his 15-year-old students referenced the GII in class and asked about the factors driving innovation performance in India. For us, this interaction was a gratifying acknowledgement of our efforts to promote and normalise discussions around innovation and raise awareness of its significance in driving economic development. 

Is there anything that you wish to measure better than you can today?

Yes! We are particularly interested in measuring grassroots innovation activity to account better for the innovative activity in developing countries. These innovations can empower local communities and individuals to address their specific challenges and needs and can often be more effective and sustainable than top-down approaches. However, grassroots innovations are difficult to measure globally due to their context-specific and often undocumented nature. To address these measurement gaps, we are currently developing the idea of establishing the GII Data Lab with the aim to develop data experiments and to explore ways to scale up these experiments into possible comparable and replicable indicators that we can eventually include in the GII framework. Other areas of interest include innovation linkages and access to finance by private companies.

What’s your favourite innovation?

In post-pandemic times, “working from home” is my favourite innovation! Of course, technological advances have made it easier to work remotely and connect with colleagues from anywhere in the world. But most importantly, I believe this new way of working will further change the way organisations attract and retain their talent by ensuring we all commit to work without compromising a rich life aside from it. Isn’t that the dream?