Many would quickly say the United States. Some might suggest China. However, according to the World Intellectual Property Organization’s Global Innovation Index, the U.S. ranks only third, while China comes in at eleventh.
The index takes a broad view of innovation, considering both “inputs” and “outputs.” Inputs include factors like the number of engineering graduates, venture capital deals, and research and development (R&D) expenditures. Outputs include patents, scientific publications, and high-tech exports. The ranking also evaluates a country’s ability to produce and adopt new technologies. Nations that import large quantities of high-tech goods and invest heavily in foreign intellectual property tend to rank higher. Interestingly, the index also considers unconventional indicators, such as the number of feature films a country produces and the contributions made to collaborative software projects on GitHub, a popular platform for sharing data and code.
Based on these metrics, Switzerland holds the top spot on the index. Since many of the measures are scaled to a country’s GDP or population, smaller countries like Switzerland can outperform scientific powerhouses like the U.S. and China. In 2022, Switzerland filed 5,430 global patent applications—less than a tenth of the U.S. total. Yet, despite its smaller size, Switzerland’s economy is remarkably robust in relation to its population. It employs more researchers per capita than the U.S., even though it has far fewer researchers overall. While Switzerland may not have contributed to global advancement on the same scale as America, it is, pound for pound, a more inventive country.
Several countries have made significant strides in the rankings over the past five years, including Indonesia, Mauritius, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Brazil, and Pakistan. However, global progress in innovation has been uneven. Between 2020 and 2022, the world saw an innovation boom, but this trend appears to be slowing. In 2023, scientific publications dropped by 5%, and for the first time since 2009, the number of international patent applications declined. While the world’s largest companies increased their R&D spending by 6% in 2023, this was still lower than the 10–13% growth seen between 2019 and 2021. Additionally, venture capital deals dropped by 9.5%, and their total value plummeted by 39%.
Source: Economist
