Alcatel-Lucent Joins Leading Institutions To Highlight The Role Of Innovation In Driving Sustainable Prosperity

Alcatel-Lucent (Euronext and NYSE: ALU) has joined a group of international organizations to launch The Global Innovation Index (GII) 2011 edition, a sweeping country-by-country analysis of the role innovation is playing in the growth, prosperity and sustainability of both mature and emerging economies.

The GII report provides a wealth of data that social policy researchers, companies, governments and non-governmental organizations can use to evaluate and help make recommendations and drive policies that can foster innovation. As importantly, it provides a powerful tool for exploring the benefits of deliberate efforts to promote innovation.

The GII report features a foreword from Ben Verwaayen, Chief Executive Officer of Alcatel-Lucent entitled The World Needs Open Innovation, in which he observes: “The Global Innovation Index is laying the foundation for a global conversation of the role of innovation. By bringing together diverse parties to explore how innovation is being applied around the world, and what conditions make for successful innovation, it is making an essential contribution to the promotion of open innovation as a basic operating principal for the global community”.

Alcatel-Lucent is participating in the GII report as a Knowledge Partner along with other leading groups including the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), a specialized agency of the United Nations, the Confederation of Indian Industry and Booz and Company. As an active partner in the development of the report, Alcatel-Lucent helped to define key research criteria.

Alcatel-Lucent also contributed a research chapter entitled Making Cities Smart and Sustainable, which explores how open innovation can be applied to the challenge of rapid urbanization underway around the globe, and help realize the potential of a connected world. The chapter discusses how innovation, in terms of both ideas and technologies, is essential to making cities more environmentally and economically sustainable, to increasing digital inclusion (in both cities and rural areas), and to better supporting the health and welfare of city residents. The chapter also concludes that strong collaborations between governments, businesses, non-governmental organizations, universities and other institution are needed to address large-scale societal challenges of this kind.

In association with the report, Alcatel-Lucent also has conducted an analysis of data included in the GII and found that one particular “foundation” for innovation -- Information and Communication Technology (ICT) -- is clearly correlated with most dimensions of well-being. This analysis reveals that countries that have higher levels of ICT penetration tend toward political stability and lower levels of violence, had more effective governments, and benefited from more robust educational, business and research and development environments.

Soumitra Dutta, Roland Berger Professor of Business and Technology at INSEAD and editor of the GII Report, said: “This year’s edition underwent major developments and is the result of a collaborative effort among INSEAD and Knowledge Partners. These key players gathered around the project have contributed to strengthen the GII value as a key benchmarking tool to facilitate public-private dialogue, whereby policy makers, business leaders, and other stakeholders can evaluate progress on a continual basis. They have provided valuable input to the research underlying the GII”.