Recently, on June 15, 2017, the World Intellectual Property Organization (hereinafter referred to as the ‘WIPO’) published the Global Innovation Index (hereinafter referred to as GII) for the year 2017, revolving around the theme:
‘Innovation Feeding the World. The GII is an annual ranking of countries by their capacity for, and success in, ‘innovation’. It is published by Cornell University, the Institut Européen d’Administration des Affaires (hereinafter referred to as ‘INSEAD’), in collaboration with WIPO and is based on both subjective and objective data derived from several sources, including the International Telecommunication Union, the World Bank and the World Economic Forum. The GII is commonly used by corporate and government officials to compare countries by their level of innovation in the field of science and technology, most importantly a country’s economic growth annually. Each year, the GII surveys some 130 economies using dozens of metrics, from patent filings to education spending providing decision makers a high-level look at the innovative activity which increasingly drives economic and social growth. For the last ten years, it has been observed that there is an innovative capacity gap between developed and developing nations due to lackluster growth rates for research and development activities at both the government and corporate levels.
| India’s Ranking Over Time | |
| 2017 | 60 |
| 2016 | 66 |
| 2015 | 81 |
| 2014 | 76 |
| 2013 | 66 |
On analyzing the annual growth rate of other nations, it can be inferred that Indian markets are on the rise and its growth rate is not stagnant. It has moved up six places to 60th among 130 nations, emerging as the top-ranked economy in Central and South Asia. Previously, in 2016 it was ranked in 66. This year’s report demonstrated India to be a consistent outperformer on innovation relative to its GDP per capita. It made important strides in innovation input and output performance, which highlighted the continual improvement of India in terms of investment, tertiary education, quality of its publications and universities, its ICT services, exports and innovation clusters. According to the Director General of Confederation of Indian Industries (hereinafter referred to as the ‘CII’) Chandrajit Banerjee, “Public policy plays a pivotal role in creating an enabling environment conducive to innovation, and since the last two years, we have seen important activities in India like the formation of India’s high-level task force on innovation and consultative exercises on both innovation policy and better innovation metrics.[1]”
Thus, WIPO has ranked India as the top global exporter of information, computer and telecommunications (ICT) services. It highlighted that India is working very actively to close the innovation gap each passing year. One initiative in this regard can be the creation of an India Innovation Index that adapts the GII to meet its strategic interests so that it can target areas for improvement and set goals.
Further analysis of the report issued by WIPO reveals that the top five nations for 2017 were Switzerland, Sweden, the Netherlands, the United States and Britain respectively. Switzerland once again is the gold medalist amongst nations, for the seventh year running. Switzerland remains highly successful in transforming its resources into more numerous and more varied innovation outputs. In 2016, it filed the most patent applications per head to the European Patent Office.