At Mind the Bridge, we are regularly asked to put numbers on something that is, by nature, hard to pin down: the health of an innovation ecosystem. Governments, corporates and investors all want the same thing: A benchmark that tells them how their country or region stacks up against the rest of the world. This is the tension we have been working on for years, refining a model that is standard enough to compare Boston with Sao Paulo, Tel Aviv with Turin, yet flexible enough to capture what is genuinely different about each. This week in Seoul, we presented the latest application of that work: The Innovation Economy of South Korea. It's a good occasion to lay out, briefly, how we think the exercise should be done. Move up and the base narrows into scaleups, or companies that have shown enough traction to raise more than $1 million in venture capital. Scaleups are the most structured, most visible output of an ecosystem, and for that reason they are among the best proxies for its...
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