The World Intellectual Property Organization’s (WIPO) Global Innovation Index 2012 reveals that Finland has moved up from 5th to 4th place in the world, behind the leaders, Switzerland, Sweden and Singapore. The report ranks 141 countries/economies on the basis of their innovation capabilities and results. The Top 10 leaders in this year’s Global Innovation Index are:
- Switzerland
- Sweden
- Singapore
- Finland
- United Kingdom
- Netherlands
- Denmark
- Hong Kong (China)
- Ireland
- United States of America
The report shows that the USA continues to be an innovation leader but also cites relative shortfalls in areas such as education, human resources and innovation outputs as causing a drop in its innovation ranking.
Finland was ranked 1st in many of the categories and sub-criteria including Political Environment and State of Cluster Development. In Human Capital & Research Finland was at the 3rd place and came 4th in Knowledge and Technology Outputs.
Wipo’s Global Innovation Index was published for the fifth time, this year together with French business school Insead. The purpose of the Index is “to find metrics and approaches to better capture the richness of innovation in society and go beyond such traditional measures of innovation as the number of research articles and the level of research and development expenditures.”
The metrics consists of seven input pillars from which five capture elements of the national economy that enable innovative activities (institutions, human capital and research, infrastructure, market sophistication, and business sophistication) and two the actual evidence of innovation outputs (knowledge & technology outputs and creative outputs).
