A portfolio analysis methodology to inform innovation policy and foresight

•A new method for combining innovation, foresight and decision analysis•Provides a rank of a list of programs and evaluate their impact on innovation indicators•Informs policy makers of potential uncovered gaps in innovation strategies•Provide inputs to foresight studies aimed at improving a country's innovation ecosystem.

This paper describes a new method for combining innovation foresight, country's innovation indices, and decision analysis to identify the best combination of investments to improve national innovation systems, using Brazil as the example. The sub-pillars for human factors for innovation of the Global Innovation Index (GII) (Cornell University, INSEAD, and WIPO, 2014) are used to develop a gap coverage matrix that is analysed using the Portman method (Chow et al., 2011), to enable the identification of an optimum portfolio of investments, taking into account the level of funding for each program and any interrelationships between them. The methodology could either be refined through a foresight exercise or provide inputs to a foresight study for innovation policy that would generate threshold values for the gaps and describe their relative importance. The latter could provide an explicit and quantitative guide to decision-makers in the implementation of the foresight results. The implications of the method for FTA practice are discussed.