This research seeks to clarify Uruguay's positioning, its opportunities for improvement and its challenges in terms of innovation for competitiveness. To this end, it identifies critical points and makes visible possible ways for both the public sector and private agents to make decisions aimed at boosting innovation as a driver of greater productivity and sustainable improvement of the competitiveness of the Uruguayan economy in the long term.
The study points out that "having innovative companies favours greater competitiveness of the economy as a whole, generating qualified employment and technological spillovers to other economic agents, with a decisive impact on the country's development".
In addition, he says that "the answer to the problem of competitiveness is to generate value by investing in innovation, technology and job creation with higher levels of training. There are possibilities for productivity gains by transforming processes through technology, not by reducing social protection.
The results of the Global Innovation Index (GII) elucidate Uruguay's position and its most striking strengths and weaknesses. Uruguay obtained a score of 30.8 in the global ranking in 2020 and fell 7 places (from 62 to 69 out of 131 countries). In addition, it went from being within the expected value in relation to GDP per capita to performing below that value. Uruguay has its best performance in the GII 2020 in the "Institutions" pillar and its weakest performance is in the "Market Sophistication" pillar.
In terms of competitiveness, the 'Global Competitiveness Index' (GCI) published annually by the World Economic Forum (WEF) was taken as a reference. In 2019, Uruguay obtained a GCI of 63, which places it in 54th place among the 141 countries surveyed. Within the subgroup "Innovation Ecosystem", for the pillar "Innovation Capacity", our country has a poor performance in the variables of (i) cluster development and (ii) multi-stakeholder collaboration.
In addition to the survey and analysis of international comparative studies, the study developed ten in-depth interviews with qualified informants on the topics of competitiveness, productivity, innovation and digital transformation.
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