Global Innovation Index 2024

The World Intellectual Property Organization's Global Innovation Index 2024 presents a nuanced portrait of global innovation dynamics amid economic uncertainty and shifting investment patterns. Published in its 17th edition, the GII 2024 evaluates 133 economies across 78 innovation indicators, revealing both challenges and opportunities in the contemporary innovation landscape.

Bottom Line Up Front: While traditional innovation leaders maintain their positions, the report highlights a concerning slowdown in innovation investments alongside continued technological progress, particularly in health, connectivity, and green technologies. The year's special focus on social entrepreneurship offers fresh perspectives on how innovation can address pressing societal challenges through business-driven solutions.

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Global Innovation Landscape: Current State and Trends

The GII 2024 operates against a backdrop of steady but sluggish global economic growth, marked by shrinking innovation finance and stagnant productivity. Innovation investment slowed significantly in 2023, marking a notable reversal from previous years and making prospects for 2024-2025 remarkably uncertain. This deceleration particularly affected venture capital funding, which dropped by approximately 40 percent in 2023, alongside declining growth in research and development expenditures and falling international patent filings.

Despite these concerning trends, technological progress continues robustly across diverse fields including supercomputing, connectivity, health technologies, sanitation systems, and green technologies. Technological progress remained strong in 2023, particularly in health-related fields like genome sequencing, as well as in computing power and electric batteries. Technology adoption has also deepened, especially in 5G networks, robotics, and electric vehicles.

Innovation Leadership: The Global Hierarchy

Top Performers and Consistent Leaders

For the 14th consecutive year, Switzerland maintains its position as the world's most innovative economy, followed by Sweden, the United States, Singapore, and the United Kingdom. Switzerland's dominance stems from its leadership in innovation outputs, ranking first in both Knowledge and technology outputs and Creative outputs, while maintaining top-five positions across most other pillars except Infrastructure.

Sweden demonstrates particular strength in Infrastructure (1st globally), Business sophistication (1st), Knowledge and technology outputs (2nd), and Human capital and research (3rd). The country excels in specific metrics including researcher density, intellectual property payments and receipts, knowledge-intensive employment, and global brand value.

The United States, maintaining its third position, scores best globally in nine of the 78 GII 2024 innovation indicators, including university quality, scientific publication impact (H-index), software spending, and intellectual property receipts. Singapore takes the lead in 2024 in terms of number of GII innovation indicators for which it ranks top globally, ranking 1st in the world on 14 out of 78 indicators.

Rising Powers and Regional Dynamics

The most compelling narrative emerges from rapidly ascending economies. China, Türkiye, India, Vietnam, and the Philippines are the fastest 10-year climbers in the GII rankings. These nations demonstrate that innovation leadership is not confined to traditional economic powerhouses but can emerge through strategic investments in human capital, infrastructure, and supportive policy frameworks. Asian middle-income economies China, India, Indonesia, and Türkiye surge ahead, while Thailand and Vietnam move closer to the top 40. This regional dynamism reflects broader shifts in global innovation geography, with Asia increasingly becoming a critical hub for technological advancement and creative output.

Regional Analysis: Innovation Ecosystems Across Continents

Asia-Pacific: The Innovation Dynamo

The Asia-Pacific region continues to demonstrate exceptional innovation momentum. Indonesia enters the top 60 and is the economy in South East Asia, East Asia, and Oceania that makes the greatest advancement in ranks in 2024. Indonesia's progress is particularly noteworthy, with improvements in policy stability for business operations and key intellectual property indicators including industrial designs, trademarks, and PCT patents.

Indonesia jumped to 54th place among 133 countries, a significant leap from its 61st position in 2023—an impressive climb of seven ranks in just one year. Despite this advancement, Indonesia still trails several ASEAN nations, including the Philippines (53rd), Vietnam (44th), Thailand (41st), Malaysia (33rd), and Singapore (4th).

Thailand demonstrates sustained long-term progression, achieving its best rank since 2009 and moving toward the top 40. Thailand is demonstrating increased potential, nearing the top 40 – its best rank since 2009 – and sustaining its progression over the long run.

Europe: Maintaining Excellence

Europe continues to host the highest concentration of innovation leaders among the top 25 economies, with 15 European countries represented and seven in the top 10. Notable climbers include Austria (17th), Ireland (19th), and Luxembourg (20th). Ireland's ascension is particularly impressive, ranking top globally in ICT services exports and intellectual property payments, partly influenced by foreign multinational presence in the ICT sector.

Americas: Mixed Performance

Brazil maintains its leadership position in Latin America and the Caribbean at 50th place, followed by Chile (51st) and Mexico (56th). However, the region faces challenges as other world regions, such as Central and Southern Asia, will soon overtake Latin America and the Caribbean in terms of innovation performance. This trend should serve as a call to action for regional policymakers to enhance long-term innovation strategies.

Colombia shows particular promise, climbing five ranks and improving notably in the Innovation Output Sub-Index. The country ranks 18th globally for unicorn company valuations, with their joint value representing approximately 2 percent of GDP.

Africa: Emerging Potential

In Sub-Saharan Africa, Mauritius (55th) is followed by South Africa (69th), Botswana (87th), Cabo Verde (90th), and Senegal (92nd). Kenya gains four places in the ranking, consolidating its position within the top 100. Rwanda leads the low-income group, followed by Madagascar and Togo, with Rwanda maintaining its overperformer status for 12 consecutive years.

Science and Technology Clusters: Global Innovation Hubs

The GII 2024 identifies the world's top 100 science and technology clusters, revealing concentrated areas of inventive and scientific activity. The top science and technology innovation hub in 2024 is Tokyo–Yokohama (Japan), followed by Shenzhen–Hong Kong–Guangzhou, Beijing, Seoul, and Shanghai–Suzhou.

Remarkably, the world's five biggest science and technology clusters are all located in East Asia, underscoring the region's dominance in innovation concentration. China leads with the most clusters (26) in the top 100, followed closely by the United States with 20 clusters.

Cambridge in the United Kingdom and San Jose–San Francisco, CA, in the United States are the two most S&T-intensive clusters relative to population density. This metric reveals not just absolute innovation output but efficiency in generating scientific and technological advancement relative to population size.

Special Focus: Social Entrepreneurship and Creative Economy

Defining Social Entrepreneurship in the Innovation Context

The GII 2024's special theme, "Unlocking the Promise of Social Entrepreneurship," addresses a crucial but often overlooked dimension of innovation. Social entrepreneurship marries business practices with social goals to address some of the world's most pressing social and environmental challenges, such as creating jobs, providing education, improving infrastructure, and developing tailor-made sustainable solutions for local needs.

This focus is particularly relevant for cultural and creative economy practitioners, as social enterprises often operate at the intersection of cultural preservation, creative expression, and social impact. The global impact of social entrepreneurship spans issues such as access to education, sustainable clothing, peace promotion in conflict zones, and the preservation of indigenous cultures.

Innovation Models in Social Entrepreneurship

Social enterprises adopt diverse approaches to innovation that extend beyond traditional business models. Innovation activities do not stop at the factory gates or office door. Beyond product and process innovation and IP activity, social enterprises also engage in systems innovation, involving novel approaches to shaping the political, economic, social, and cultural systems that perpetuate the social problems they seek to address.

The relationship between social entrepreneurship and intellectual property presents interesting dynamics for creative economy stakeholders. Open-sourcing software and other technologies for the benefit of other social enterprises, governments, and even corporations is a common scaling tactic, though the potential role of formal IP is often underappreciated or unknown.

Global Scale and Economic Impact

The economic significance of social entrepreneurship is substantial. Estimates suggest that there are between 10 to 11 million social enterprises and around 30 million social entrepreneurs globally, contributing approximately USD 2 trillion to the global GDP. In India specifically, the market potential for social enterprises is expected to reach USD 8 billion by 2025.

Investment Trends and Financial Dynamics

Venture Capital and R&D Patterns

The GII 2024 reveals concerning trends in innovation financing. Venture capital and scientific publications declined sharply back to pre-pandemic levels, with the impact being most pronounced in emerging regions such as Latin America and Africa. Reflecting a deteriorating climate for risk finance, the value of VC investments has been falling from the exceptionally high levels of 2021, with a 36 percent decline.

Corporate R&D spending also shows deceleration. Worldwide, R&D expenditure by the highest R&D-spending corporations grew by around 6 percent in real terms in 2023, below the long-term growth rate for the last 6 years and down strongly from peaks of 10 to 13 percent between 2019–2021.

Scientific Publications and Patent Activity

Scientific publications dropped by 5 percent in 2023, following growth rates above 8 percent annually in 2020 and 2021, and a slowdown in 2022. This decline suggests a normalization after the pandemic-driven research surge but raises questions about sustained scientific output growth.

Despite these declines, technological progress continues in specific domains. In pharmaceuticals, 69 novel active substances were introduced globally in 2023, marking a significant 9.5 percent increase from 2022, surpassing the decade's average annual growth rate of 3.7 percent.

Policy Implications and Strategic Recommendations

For Government and Intergovernmental Organizations

Given your work with ASEAN and APEC frameworks, several policy implications emerge from the GII 2024 findings:

1. Regional Innovation Coordination: The strong performance of Asian economies suggests opportunities for enhanced regional innovation collaboration. ASEAN economies show varied performance levels, indicating potential for knowledge sharing and capacity building initiatives.

2. Social Innovation Integration: The emphasis on social entrepreneurship aligns with sustainable development goals and cultural preservation initiatives common in intergovernmental frameworks. Policymakers have an important role in ensuring social enterprises have access to the human capital needed for innovation, beginning with changes to school curricula to emphasize entrepreneurialism with social impact.

3. Creative Economy Development: The GII's focus on creative outputs provides benchmarking opportunities for cultural and creative industry policies. Countries excelling in creative goods exports and cultural innovation offer models for regional adaptation.

   
   

Investment Climate Considerations

The current investment slowdown presents both challenges and opportunities. While venture capital has declined, the continued strength in technological progress suggests that well-targeted investments could yield significant returns. Social entrepreneurship offers an alternative investment model that combines financial returns with social impact, potentially attractive to impact investors and development finance institutions.

Future Outlook and Emerging Trends

Technology Adoption and Progress

Despite investment concerns, technology adoption continues expanding globally. The deepening adoption of 5G, robotics, and electric vehicles indicates that innovation implementation remains robust even as innovation investment faces headwinds. This suggests that previously developed technologies are finding market applications and scaling opportunities.

Socioeconomic Impact Recovery

Key socioeconomic indicators, like global poverty reduction, labor productivity, and life expectancy are improving, indicating that innovation's beneficial effects are materializing despite investment challenges. However, green technology and environmental indicators have either been progressing more slowly than before or have declined, highlighting the need for sustained focus on environmental innovation.

Regional Rebalancing

The continued rise of middle-income economies, particularly in Asia, suggests a rebalancing of global innovation geography. This trend offers opportunities for international cooperation and knowledge transfer, while challenging traditional innovation hierarchies.

Conclusions and Strategic Implications

The WIPO Global Innovation Index 2024 presents a complex picture of global innovation dynamics characterized by persistent leadership from traditional powerhouses alongside remarkable ascension from emerging economies. The temporary setback in innovation investments, while concerning, occurs against a backdrop of continued technological progress and expanding technology adoption.

For practitioners in arts, culture, and creative economy working within intergovernmental frameworks, the GII 2024 offers several key insights:

Innovation Democratization: The rapid rise of diverse economies demonstrates that innovation success is achievable through strategic focus rather than merely resource abundance. This creates opportunities for knowledge sharing and capacity building within regional frameworks like ASEAN and APEC.

Social Innovation Prominence: The emphasis on social entrepreneurship validates approaches that combine economic development with cultural preservation and social impact. This alignment supports integrated policy approaches that address multiple development objectives simultaneously.

Creative Output Recognition: The inclusion of creative outputs as a core innovation metric acknowledges the economic and social value of cultural and creative industries, supporting arguments for increased investment and policy support in these sectors.

The path forward requires sustained commitment to innovation investment, enhanced international cooperation, and recognition of innovation's diverse forms and applications. As global challenges become increasingly complex, the integration of technological innovation with social entrepreneurship and creative solutions offers promising pathways for addressing societal needs while fostering economic growth.

The current moment of investment uncertainty should be viewed as an opportunity to refocus innovation strategies toward more inclusive, sustainable, and socially beneficial outcomes. For government and intergovernmental actors, this means developing policies that support not just technological advancement but also social innovation and creative economy development as integral components of national and regional innovation ecosystems.