Tokyo (SCCIJ) – Switzerland has been ranked as the world’s most innovative country for the 10th consecutive year. Sweden, the U.S., U.K and Netherlands follow in this year’s global innovation ranking, with a second Asian economy – the Republic of Korea – joining the top 10 for the first time, Singapore being number 8. Japan dropped one place to rank #16. The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), the French business school INSEAD and Cornell University publish the innovation ranking annually.
Switzerland stays at the top of the Global Innovation Index for ten years in a row (Source: Pixabay CC0).
Consistent high performance
Switzerland displays a strong and solid performance across all seven areas of the Global Innovation Index (GII), and ranks among the top 3 in 19 out of its 80 indicators, the index publishers said. A consistent producer of high-quality innovations, Switzerland also excels in the innovativeness of its business sector, with a strong share of knowledge-intensive employment and high R&D expenditures performed and financed by the private sector.
The Alpine country ranks among the top 3 in patents by origin, scientific and technical articles, high-technology manufacturing, intellectual property receipts, entertainment and media market, and Country-code top-level domains. Host to 122 of the world’s top 5,000 brands, this year Switzerland ranks also 2nd in the new GII indicator, Global brand value. Its top brands include Nestlé (food), UBS (banks) and ABB (engineering and construction).
Strong education and research
Its human capital and research systems register relevant results. Switzerland ranks 4th in R&D expenditures, 5th in R&D-intensive global companies and 4th in the quality of universities, with ETH Zurich (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology) and École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) among the top 20 global universities.
Switzerland ranks 2nd after the United States of America in its quality of innovation, thanks to the highquality of its universities and scientific publications, but also – and especially – thanks to the great efforts it makes to internationalize its inventions, ranking 1st globally in patent families in two or more offices.
Many private-public collaborations
Other indicators where Switzerland achieves a top 3 ranking are found across various GII areas that include Government effectiveness, Environmental performance, Domestic credit to private sector, Market capitalization and ICT services imports.
The country also shows a particularly well-connected innovation ecosystem, ranking 2nd in University–industry collaborations and 5th in Cluster development, with Zurich (49th) and Lausanne (89th) among the world’s top 100 science and technology clusters.
Science hotspots in Japan
Japan ranks 15th among the 49 high-income group economies and 5th among the 17 economies in South East Asia, East Asia, and Oceania. But altogether, it slided by one rank down to place 16. In its associated annual ranking of the world’s economies on innovation capacity and output, the GII shows year-on-year stability at the top, but a gradual eastward shift in the locus of innovation as a group of Asian economies – notably China, India, the Philippines and Vietnam – have advanced considerably in the ranking over the years.
For the last four years, the GII has also published a ranking of the world’s top 100 science and technology hotspots. In 2020, Tokyo-Yokohama is the top performing hotspot again, followed by Shenzhen-Hong Kong-Guangzhou, Seoul, Beijing, and San Jose-San Francisco.
The U.S. continues to host the largest number of hotspots (25), followed by China (17), Germany (10), and Japan (5).
Text: SCCIJ with material of WIPO
