The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) has recently published the Global Innovation Index (GII) 2023 wherein India ranks 40^th among 132 countries of the world. WIPO of the United Nations is the global forum for Intellectual Property (IP) services, policy, information, and cooperation. It is a self-funding agency with 193 member countries. GII is a leading reference accepted worldwide as a measure of the performance of the innovation ecosystem of a country. It is published annually and considered as a valuable tool used to assess the progress in innovation in a country over time.

According to GII 2023, currently Switzerland is the most innovative economy of the world followed by Sweden, the United States, the United Kingdom and Singapore. It’s worth mentioning that India has made laudable progress in S&T innovations during the recent past and secured the 40^th position in GII 2022 and GII 2023, which has been a virtual jump by 41 ranks from the 81^st rank in 2015. In fact, India has been consistently improving its ranking during the last few years – 48^th in 2020, and 46^th in 2021. Moreover, this year India secured the top position among the 37 lower-middle-income countries and among the 10 economies in Central and Southern Asia. India, Iran, the Philippines, Turkey, Indonesia, and Vietnam are among the countries that showed fastest improvement in the GII ranking over the last decade.

India’s robust innovation landscape is represented in the latest ranking by certain key indicators like ICT services exports, venture capital received, graduates in science and engineering, and global corporate R&D investors. However, India has only four S&T clusters among the world’s top 100 compared to 24 and 21 in China and US, respectively. The S&T cluster identified in India are Chennai, Bengaluru, Mumbai, and Delhi. In terms of innovation inputs, this year India ranks 46^th while ranking 35^th in innovation outputs. In fact, India’s innovation outputs are far better than many other countries relative to its level of innovation investments.

As per GII 2023, the major innovation strengths of our economy are Domestic market scale, bn PPP$ (rank 1), ICT services exports, % total trade (rank 5) and Venture Capital received, value, % GDP (rank 6). The two leading areas where India showed remarkable progress include market sophistication (20^th rank), knowledge and technology outputs (22^nd). However, lower performance has been shown in human capital and research (48^th), creative outputs (49^th), institutions (56^th) and business sophistication (57^th). On the other hand, India’s major weaknesses are identified in the areas of Environmental performance (131 rank), Tertiary inbound mobility (110), Females employed with advanced degrees (106), ICT use (103), ICT access (101), Pupil-teacher ratio (101), Knowledge-intensive employment (99), School life expectancy, years (86), Researchers, Full Time Equivalent (FTE)/million population (81) and Entertainment and media market/thousand population (55). India has also shown substantial growth in respect of patents by origin (13.51% increase compared to the previous year) and citable documents H-index (8.99% increase compared to the previous year). Another noteworthy achievement of the country has been in the aspects of Startup Finance Recognition (9^th rank) and Venture Capital Performance (6^th rank).

The latest benchmarks achieved by our country in Global Innovation Index 2023 clearly demonstrate the commitment of the nation towards innovation and its resolve to continuously strive towards becoming a global leader in the near future by achieving self-reliance through innovation.