Enabling Innovation Measurement at the Sub-National Level is part of the World Intellectual Property Organization’s (WIPO) Intellectual Property (IP) and Innovation Ecosystems Sector (IES) response to supporting member states wishing to develop their own complementary and mutually reinforcing sub-national innovation indices. Drawing on the Global Innovation Index (GII) framework WIPO is proceeding in two ways: 1) organizing workshops on the exchange of best practices, and 2) providing this study on sub-national innovation indices.

The Global Innovation Index 2023 (GII) takes the pulse of innovation against a background of an economic and geopolitical environment fraught with uncertainty. Tracking the most recent global innovation trends, the GII finds that – despite a climate of disquiet and a decline in risk capital investment – opportunities abound as a result of the incipient Digital Age and Deep Science innovation waves. At its core, the GII 2023 reveals who is leading in global innovation, ranking the innovation performance of 132 economies and highlighting their strengths and weaknesses. In addition, it identifies the world’s top 100 science and technology clusters. The GII is a “tool for action” regarding innovation policy. Governments around the world have used the GII to benchmark innovation performance, perfect innovation metrics and, ultimately, to shape evidence-based innovation policymaking. In the context of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), since 2019, the GII has been recognized by the United Nations General Assembly to be a benchmark for measuring innovation, including more recently in a post-pandemic environment.

The GII 2024 reveals who is leading globally in innovation, ranking the innovation performance of 133 economies and highlighting their strengths and weaknesses. The thematic focus of the 2024 edition is social entrepreneurship. It looks at how a flurry of new ventures are finding innovative solutions directly addressing critical societal issues. Examples drawn from around the world showcase successful examples of social entrepreneurship, helping guide innovation policymakers and support schemes to better scale social entrepreneurship ventures for maximum systemic impact.

Measuring Innovation is a major step towards evidence-based innovation policy making. It complements traditional “positioning”-type indicators with ones that show how innovation is, or could be, linked to policy.

Based on new empirical evidence, this publication compares the rates and patterns of mobility of high-skilled labour in a sample of OECD countries.

Measuring innovation in education and understanding how it works is essential to improve the quality of the education sector. Monitoring systematically how pedagogical practices evolve would considerably increase the international education knowledge base. We need to examine whether, and how ...