Global Innovation Index

• 1. Introduction

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  The Global Innovation Index began in 2007 as the project of a business school and a British magazine. INSEAD and World Business created it, and economist Soumitra Dutta was the person behind its design. What started as a niche academic exercise now shapes how governments around the world plan their economies. By 2025, the index was scoring 139 countries and regions. Together, those economies represent 93.6 percent of the world's population. What does it actually measure? How is a country's capacity for innovation distilled into a single number? And why have critics argued that the method may obscure more than it reveals?

• 2. How the Number Is Built

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  The Global Innovation Index arrives at its final score through a two-part structure. There is an Innovation Input Sub-Index and an Innovation Output Sub-Index. Each gets equal weight in a simple average. The Input side rests on five pillars; the Output side rests on two. Each pillar describes a particular attribute of innovation, and each pillar can carry up to five indicators. Scores within a pillar are calculated using a weighted average method. To appear in the 2025 edition, a country had to clear a data coverage requirement of at least 35 indicators on the Input side and at least 15 on the Output side. Countries also needed scores for at least two sub-pillars per pillar. The 2025 edition drew on 78 distinct indicators in total. The breadth of what counts as an indicator reveals a great deal about the index's underlying assumptions: "Ease of Getting Credit" and "Venture Capital Deals" sit alongside measures like "Electricity Output" and "Ease of Paying Taxes," which carries only half-weighting.

• 3. A Growing Audience

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  Since its launch, an increasing number of governments have turned to the index each year to diagnose their own performance and design responses. The reach of the ranking became formalized on the 19th of December 2019, when the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted a resolution on science, technology and innovation for sustainable development that specifically mentioned the index. That resolution marked a shift: a measure that began at a business school now carried the imprimatur of the world's foremost multilateral body. Until 2021, WIPO published the index in partnership with Cornell University, INSEAD, and other organisations. After that, WIPO took sole responsibility for publication. Data feeding the index comes from bodies including the International Telecommunication Union, the World Bank, and the World Economic Forum.

• 4. The Critics' Case

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  Several scholars have taken issue with the variables the index treats as proxies for innovation. Factors like "Ease of Protecting Minority Investors" and "Electricity Output" appear alongside indicators more directly tied to invention and research. A 2024 study by Sarcina, Paolantonio, Valentini, and Iannone pressed the critique further. Their argument was that the analysis of the GII pillars is, in their phrasing, "too aggregated to provide the necessary visibility of the determinants of innovation performance." Within a single pillar, the researchers found that individual indicators "contribute with different weights and have different statistical significance." Their proposal was not to discard the index but to redefine its calculation so it captures only "the most statistically representative variables." They also called for the model to incorporate "geographical, demographic, and socio-economic factors," pointing out that what drives innovation in a high-income country may differ considerably from what drives it in an economy at an earlier stage of development.

• 5. Beyond the Rankings

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  Every two years, the Global Innovation Index frames its edition around a theme that goes past the raw rankings. In 2020, the chosen theme was "Who will finance innovation?" That edition examined the evolution of existing financing mechanisms and mapped both progress and persistent gaps. Previous editions had turned their thematic lens on health innovation, environmental innovation, and agricultural and food innovation. The thematic layer was designed to generate insight that a ranked list alone cannot deliver. Where the rankings compress each country to a score, the thematic chapters open up a question that cuts across economies at every income level.

• 6. What the 2025 Table Shows

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  The 2025 edition placed its top scorer at 66.0, with the second-ranked economy at 62.6 and the third at 61.7. All of the top nine slots went to high-income economies. The first upper middle-income country appeared at rank 10 with a score of 56.6. The bottom of the 139-economy table sat at a score of 11.9. A pattern runs across the full list: high-income economies dominate the upper half, while lower middle-income and low-income economies cluster toward the lower half. That concentration is precisely the pattern the 2024 Sarcina study argued the current model is ill-equipped to interrogate, given its single global formula applied equally to economies at vastly different stages of development.