Global Innovation Index 2021

By Dumont

The Global Innovation Index (GII) ranks world economies according to their innovation capabilities. Consisting of roughly 80 indicators, grouped into innovation inputs and outputs, the GII aims to capture the multi-dimensional facets of innovation. In its 14th edition this year, is published by WIPO, in partnership with the Portulans Institute and with the support of our corporate partners: the Brazilian National Confederation of Industry (CNI), Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), Ecopetrol (Colombia), and the Turkish Exporters Assembly (TIM). In 2021, an Academic Network was established to engage world-leading universities in GII research and support the dissemination of GII results within the academic community.

In Latin America and the Caribbean, only Chile, Mexico, Costa Rica and Brazil rank among the top 60. Except for Mexico, few economies in this region have managed consistently to up their ranking over the past 10 years.

Relative to GDP, Mexico’s performance matches expectations for its level of development. Mexico also produces more innovation outputs relative to its level of innovation investments and has high scores in six out of the seven GII pillars: Human capital & research, Infrastructure, Market sophistication, Business sophistication, Knowledge & technology outputs and Creative outputs, which are above average for the upper middle income group. Compared to other economies in Latin America and the Caribbean, Mexico performs above average in all seven of the GII pillars.

Since its inception in 2007, the GII has shaped the innovation measurement agenda and become a cornerstone of economic policymaking, with an increasing number of governments systematically analyzing their annual GII results and designing policy responses to improve their performance. The GII has also been recognized by the UN Economic and Social Council in its 2019 resolution on Science, Technology and Innovation for Development as an authoritative benchmark for measuring innovation in relation to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

The 2021 GIII states that governments and enterprises in many parts of the world scaled up investments in innovation amid the massive human and economic toll of the COVID-19 pandemic, illustrating a growing acknowledgement that new ideas are critical for overcoming the pandemic and for ensuring post-pandemic economic growth.

 “The GII shows that although emerging economies often find it challenging to steadily improve their innovation systems, a few middle-income economies have managed to catch up in innovation with their more developed peers", says Former Dean and Professor of Management at Cornell University, Soumitra Dutta. “These emerging economies, among other things, have been able to successfully complement their domestic innovation with international technology transfer, develop technologically dynamic services that can be traded internationally, and ultimately have shaped more balanced innovation systems”.