Oslo Manual 2018

What is innovation and how should it be measured? Understanding the scale of innovation activities, the characteristics of innovative firms and the internal and systemic factors that can influence innovation is a prerequisite for the pursuit and analysis of policies aimed at fostering innovation. First published in 1992, the Oslo Manual is the international reference guide for collecting and using data on innovation. In this fourth edition, the manual has been updated to take into account a broader range of innovation-related phenomena as well as the experience gained from recent rounds of innovation surveys in OECD countries and partner economies and organisations.

What is the Oslo Manual?

The Oslo Manual provides guidelines for collecting and interpreting data data on innovation. It seeks to facilitate international comparability, and provides a platform for research and experimentation on innovation measurement. Its guidelines are principally intended to support national statistical offices and other producers of innovation data in designing, collecting, and publishing measures of innovation to meet a range of research and policy needs. In addition, the guidelines are also designed to be of direct value to users of information on innovation.
These guidelines should be viewed as a combination of formal statistical standards, advice on best practices, as well as proposals for extending the measurement of innovation into new domains through the use of existing and new tools.
At present, a large number of countries and international organisations recognise the importance of innovation measurement and have developed capabilities to collect such data. This manual supports this co-ordinated effort in pursuit of robust, internationally comparable data, indicators and analysis.