GENEVA (AN) — Five highly developed nations – Switzerland, Sweden, the U.S., U.K. and Singapore – have the world’s most innovative economies, but they aren't home to the five biggest science and technology clusters.
Those are all in East Asia, where Japan's sprawling urban region extending from Tokyo to Yokohama is the top performer in terms of the highest density of inventors and scientific authors, followed by three cities in China – Shenzhen, Hong Kong and Guangzhou – and Seoul, South Korea.
China for the first time edged out the United States by claiming the most science and technology clusters, says the World Intellectual Property Organization's latest Global Innovation Index released on Wednesday.
China has 24; the United States has 21 including Silicon Valley, the now sixth-ranked cluster extending from San Jose to San Francisco. The top 100 clusters remain concentrated in North America, Europe and Asia.
Germany, with nine clusters, is the nation with the third most; Munich ranks as the biggest, followed by Cologne and Stuttgart. Japan, Canada, India and South Korea, with four clusters each, all tie in fourth place. France, the U.K. and Australia, with three clusters each, rank fifth.
VC funding takes a plunge
The U.N. agency uses 80 indicators to track global innovation trends in more than 130 economies. The index, which reflects the world's slow economic recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic, high interest rates and geopolitical conflict, is meant to help policymakers and business leaders.
It also points to "an increasingly uncertain outlook for the venture capital that helps transform human ingenuity into new products and services, with the global value of VC funding marking a significant plunge last year."
And looking ahead the outlook for the rest of the year and 2024 is uncertain, it says, with high interest rates likely to continue to impact financing for innovation.
Since the pandemic, however, Mauritius, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Brazil and Pakistan have have risen the most in the global innovation rankings. WIPO says 21 economies "outperformed on innovation as expected relative to their level of development," mostly in regions of Africa, Asia and Oceania.
'From quantity to quality'
Despite the uncertainty over VC funding, last year's biggest corporate investors in R&D reached a record US$1.1 trillion, or 7.4% higher than the year earlier, WIPO says, though in 2021 it had risen by 15%.
A group of emerging economies is consistently climbing the ranks, says WIPO's Director General Daren Tang, "showing how a focus on the innovation ecosystem can make a difference."
The index "should reassure us that innovative activity currently continues to run strong but that innovative activity should continue to shift from quantity to quality," he says.
Information technology, health and energy are progressing well, according to the index, while technology adoption is "developing positively even though penetration for some technologies, such as electric vehicles and cancer treatment, remains low."
