  For long time the measurement of innovation has been in the forefront of
policy makers' and researchers' agenda worldwide. Therefore, there is an
ongoing debate about which indicators should be used to measure innovation.
Recent approaches have favoured the use of composite innovation indicators.
However, there is no consensus about the appropriate methodology to aggregate
the varying dimensions of innovation into a single summary indicator. One of
the best known examples of composite innovation indicators is the European
Innovation Scoreboard (EIS). It is a relevant tool for benchmarking innovation
in Europe. Still, the EIS lacks a proper scheme for weighting the included
indicators according to their relative importance. In this context, we propose
an appraisal methodology permitting to take into consideration the interaction
of criteria and robustness concerns related to the elicitation of the weights
assigned to the elementary indicators. With this aim, we apply the
hierarchical-SMAA-Choquet integral approach. This integrated multicriteria
decision making (MCDM) method helps the users to rank and benchmark countries'
innovation performance taking into account the importance and interaction of
criteria assigned by themselves, rather than equal weights or weights
exogenously fixed by external experts.
