Stefan Collini has noted the relative effectiveness of the UK, USA and Australia (with university based research systems) compared to France (CNRS), Germany (Max Planck, Fraunhofer etc) and other institute based systems. “The constant ‘refresh’ stimulated by research students and post-docs is one benefit. Another is the flexibility of principal investigators to re-direct their effort compared to a mission-based institute. English language may also be part of the answer. A competitive drive may be another part. History certainly plays into this, but our European neighbours have a comparable background.”He worries though about various biases that may be also at work. “UK Government reports look at trajectories where last year’s papers have one year’s citations and the papers of five years earlier have had more time for citations to accumulate. The annual data points are not like-for-like. When I track UK and e.g. China citations on a more comparable basis then the UK’s papers actually decline over time relative to world average, continuing to ‘do well’ but not nearly as well. China, however, progressively improves relative to that global average.“. He suggests that another part of the answer about UK research effectiveness may be that it (and the USA) tend to “publish, cite and move on rather quickly. Other countries appear to take time to digest their output and make the next step.“.
It would be interesting to do more work in understanding if this is true.

In his 2016 book, The Politics of Innovation [https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/07/26/why-are-some-countries-better-science-and-technology], Mark Zachary Taylor found that government policies only part way explain how countries innovate. They leave an enormous amount of unexplained success and failure. He suggested that actually social networks are very important, “to take shortcuts around markets for access to high-quality science labor, technical knowledge, investment capital and even marketing expertise. Social networks provide vital information which neither free markets nor government institutions easily capture, but networks are often ignored due to our preoccupation with domestic institutions and policies. Also, because foreign information is often the most difficult knowledge to capture, international networks play important roles in national S&T performance. So explaining innovation is not just a domestic story, it also has an international side.” He also proposes a theory of “creative insecurity,” which holds that countries generally have higher innovation rates when the external threats they face exceed domestic political or economic tensions. This allows imperatives to propel technologies forward, even when it creates many losers or requires significant investment.