Ladies and gentlemen, good morning!
It is my honor to join our country’s innovation champions in discussing the Philippine performance in this year’s Global Innovation Index (GII).
The GII has always served as a valuable source of insight for us in recognizing advancements in our country’s innovation policies and programs and identifying crucial areas that require further action. Our new industrial policy, the Inclusive Innovation Industrial Strategy (i3S) places innovation at the heart of the country’s economic transformation by growing globally competitive and innovative industries.
In recent years, we have focused our efforts in strengthening national and regional innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystems by forging government-industry-academe collaboration, enabling a strong business and policy environment, and upskilling our creative talent pool. Our experience validates the strong potential of innovation to catalyze job creation, upgrade industrial competitiveness, and attract high-value investments.
This year, we continue to perform better in terms of innovation outputs compared to our innovation inputs. This means that we were able to produce more and higher-quality innovation outputs despite our limited innovation resources and pandemic-induced setbacks. This is reflected in the GII observation that the Philippines continues to be among the countries that perform above expectations given our current level of development.
The 2021 GII highlights that many industrial competitiveness indicators remain to be the country’s strengths. We rank 1st in the world in both high-technology exports and imports (as % of trade), while maintaining the 10th place in creative goods export (as % of trade). Notably, domestic market scale, trade openness, firms offering formal training, and ICT services exports also continue to be among our country’s strengths.
The report also points out salient indicators that merit stronger future policy action, including ease of getting credit, inflow of venture capital, creation of new businesses, ease of doing business, and attracting global corporate R&D investments.
We have seen that with the right collaborators, our country’s entrepreneurial and innovative people can boost and optimize their discovery potential and serve as a primary
engine of economic
development especially amidst
the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
As envisioned by President Rodrigo Roa Duterte, this is the best way by which we can spur new enterprises, create more and better jobs, and build our industrial competitiveness towards a more comfortable life for all Filipinos.
Maraming salamat po at mabuhay tayong lahat! ♦
Date of Release: 21 September 2021