Measuring the U.S.-China Innovation Gap: The UCSD-Tsinghua Innovation Metrics Survey

Benoît Godin, writing in 2002, commented that “the relative absence of innovation surveys in the United States […] is probably a consequence of [its] uncontested superiority in innovation.”1 The superiority of the United States in innovation, however, is no longer unchallenged. Today it competes closely with foreign economies for innovation dominance in a range of products and services. The United States still maintains a global lead in many technologies, but its ability to stay at top appears fragile as other countries catch up in innovation capacity. This is increasingly the case in the U.S.-China innovation relationship.

In this research brief, we report a new methodology to measure innovation between industries in the United States and China. Using an expert opinion survey targeted to specific high-tech industries, we seek to answer two questions: 1) What is the gap in innovation between the United States and China? 2) At what rate is Chinese innovation catching up to the United States? Results from the first industry survey in integrated circuit (IC) design are presented.