Austria 2025 – Looking Out For the Frontier(s): Towards a New Framework For Frontier Measurement in Science, Technology and Innovation

Several strands of the innovation and growth literature use the notion technological or innovation frontier for performance assessment of countries and for policy recommendations as a function of the distance to these frontiers. We show that these concepts and measures are not easily interchangeable due to the lack of a common definition and a consensus on how to measure different kinds of frontier. We propose a consistent framework for the measurement of the scientific, technological, innovation and economic frontier, which also takes account of the impact of global value chains on innovation indicators. This can be used as a basis for empirical validation of the different claims of the literature using the frontier concept as well as for guiding performance comparison of countries and hence policies.