Call for a more creative country that thrives on development

"China needs scientists and engineers who are not only good at their research but who are good at communicating, organizing and taking a lead in international organizations."

The country also needs to clearly communicate to the world the meaning of the expression "indigenous innovation", a term governments, academics and businesses in China often use to describe the country's technology-led economic transformation over the past decade, she says.

Fu says some people outside China misunderstand the term, thinking it means the country plans to close its doors, feeling it does not need foreign technology.

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In fact indigenous innovation means creating something from which benefits can be drawn, including passing on intellectual property rights, all of that achieved through collaboration and modification.

Fu, who has studied and worked in China and Britain for more than a decade, says developed countries such as Britain, France and Germany all have innovation policies.

China has done well in organizing innovation projects, she says.

"National goals are broken down into several industrial goals, key projects are identified and then people organize all these projects."

As for output, innovation in China has outperformed the other BRICS countries, Fu says, adding that China is catching up and has rapidly increased research and development and other areas of innovation.

However, a country's ability to innovate "is multifaceted and needs to be comprehensively measured through a score system", she says.

The European Commission has developed an annual Innovation Union Scoreboard that provides a comparative assessment of the research and innovation performance of all the EU member states and the relative strengths and weaknesses of their research and innovation systems.

It helps member states assess areas in which they need to concentrate their efforts to boost their innovation performance. On a more limited number of indicators, available internationally, it also covers Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, India, Japan, Russia, South Africa, South Korea and the United States.

Taking the EU as a whole, China ranked 7th in the Innovation Union Scoreboard last year. South Korea and the US obtained the highest scores. China's score was about 40 percent of what South Korea and the US scored and half of what Japan scored.

Compared with EU countries, China did better only in the number of doctoral graduates, because of its population.