Massachusetts Named Most Innovative State

By CHARLENE ARSENAULT (Patch Staff)

TEWKSBURY, MA - According to Bloomberg, Route 128’s influx of business helped to put the Bay State at the very top of the country’s most innovative states.

In a ranking released by Bloomberg this week, Massachusetts came out at No. 1, followed by California, Washington, New Jersey and Connecticut.

The ranking of the states “illustrates how universities can juice local economies.”

“You’ve got these major, world-ranked institutions that have played a big role in terms of churning out some very, very well-qualified, bright people,” feeding an innovative atmosphere, said Nariman Behravesh, chief economist at IHS Inc. in Lexington, Massachusetts, to Bloomberg.

Massachusetts beat California by a nose-hair (0.03 points), Bloomberg surmising that it is “perhaps in part because high-tech density was measured via number of companies, rather than market capital. That meant that the world’s most valuable company, Cupertino, California-based Apple Inc., couldn’t lift the state to the top spot in the ranking.”

According to the release, The Bloomberg U.S. Innovation Index scored each of the 50 states on a 0-100 scale across six equally weighted metrics: R&D intensity; productivity; high-tech density; concentration of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) employment; science and engineering degree holders; and patent activity.

Massachusetts scored a total of 93.33, a 2 in R&D intensity, 6 in productivity, 1 in high-tech density, 4 in STEM concentration, 7 in science and engineering degree holders and a 2 in patent activity.

The bottom five states in innovation were Louisiana, Arkansas, South Dakota, West Virginia and Mississippi.

The data also show the limits of measuring healthy innovation. For example, the migration of talent across state lines can be difficult to measure and often captured only on delay, such as through U.S. Census bureau figures.

Read the full report here.