On 20 September, WIPO launched the 14th edition of the annual Global Innovation Index (GII). The 2021 report has a special focus on the Covid-19 crisis and its impact on innovation. The Global Innovation Index covers 132 countries and is based on 81 indicators.

According to the 2021 edition of the GII, Switzerland comes out as the best performer for the 11th year in a row, followed by Sweden and the United States. Other EU Member States in the top 10 are Netherlands (rank 6), Finland (7) Denmark (9), and Germany (10). The lowest ranked EU Member States are Romania (rank 48), Greece (47) and Croatia (42). The lowest ranked country overall is Angola.

Some important shifts occurred on this year’s edition with South Korea increasing from rank 10 to rank 5. Furthermore, some middle-income economies are changing the innovation landscape. China remains the only middle-income economy among the top 30 most innovative economies globally. However, Turkey, Viet Nam, India and the Philippines, are systematically catching up.

Another interesting finding of the 2021 report is that investment in innovation has shown great resilience during the COVID-19 pandemic, but that it varies across sectors and regions. For example, scientific publications increased by 7.6% worldwide in 2020; government budget allocations for the top R&D spending economies that have already disclosed their R&D budgets continued to grow in 2020; international patent filings via WIPO reached a new all-time high in 2020 with an increase of 3.5 percent driven by medical technology, pharmaceuticals and biotechnology; and venture capital deals grew by 5.8 percent in 2020, with strong growth in the Asia Pacific region more than compensated for declines in Northern America and Europe. In addition, the rapid development of COVID-19 vaccines powerfully fulfils the promise of technological progress, which continues apace in other technology fields, such as in ICT and renewable energy.

Finally, the report identifies the top 100 S&T regional clusters with regard to patenting and publishing performance, with new clusters emerging. According to this analysis, Tokyo-Yokohama remains the world's leading cluster, reflecting its strong patenting performance, followed by Shenzhen-Hong Kong-Guangzhou, Beijing, Seoul and San Jose-San Francisco. Paris (rank 10) is the leader in Europe, followed by Amsterdam-Rotterdam (rank 19) and Cologne (rank 20). In terms of S&T intensity, Eindhoven comes in second and only behind Cambridge (UK).  In the EU, Germany is the country with the highest number of clusters (9). Overall, the EU has 23 clusters in the top 100, almost matching the number of clusters in the United States (24) and higher than the number of Chinese clusters (19).

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