GENEVA - China and the United States (US) are home to the world’s largest science and technology (S&T) clusters, with shifts among the top 100 showing especially fast growth of innovative activity in certain emerging economies, according to an early release from the 2024 edition of the World Intellectual Property Organization - WIPO’s Global Innovation Index (GII), according to the official website of WIPO.
Each year, the GII ranks countries and economies around the world. In a pre-release ahead of a September 26, 2024 GII launch, the GII top-100 S&T Cluster ranking PDF, GII 2024 S&T Clusters Chapter looks closer to the ground - using patent filing and scientific publishing data to identify local concentrations of world-leading science and technology activity.
Launched during IP Week @ SG 2024, a premier annual intellectual property-focused event hosted by the Intellectual Property Office of Singapore, the GII S&T Cluster ranking shows that among the top 10 clusters, seven are found in Asia and three in the US.
Tokyo-Yokohama (Japan) leads as the largest global S&T cluster, followed by Shenzhen-Hong Kong-Guangzhou (China and Hong Kong, China). Beijing (China) moved up one rank from last year to take the third position. In sixth place, San Jose–San Francisco, California is the leading US cluster. China, for the second consecutive year, leads with the most clusters (26) in the top 100. The US follows closely behind with 20 clusters.
While there is little change among the top 10 S&T clusters, a different picture emerges when looking at the top 100. Clusters located in middle-income economies experienced the strongest S&T growth, with Chinese clusters seeing the steepest increases in S&T output, led by Hefei (+23%) and Zhengzhou (19%). Cairo (Egypt, with 11% S&T output growth) experienced the highest growth rate amongst other middle-income economy clusters, followed by Chennai (India, +8%) and Istanbul (Turkey, +8%).
Conversely, clusters in high-income economies generally grew at a slower pace than those located in middle-income economies, with 37 out of the 63 high-income clusters witnessing negative S&T output growth in 2023. Most North American and European clusters fell in the ranking.
“Science and technology clusters serve as the foundation of robust national innovation ecosystems. It is encouraging to see these clusters thriving not just in the mature hubs of industrialized nations, but also in the emerging innovation hotspots of selected developing economies. WIPO will continue to help these clusters to use IP to translate promising research into tangible, real-world solutions,” WIPO Director General Daren Tang said.
In addition to China, seven other middle-income economies have clusters among the top 100
• Brazil (1 cluster), with São Paulo (ranked 73rd among the top 100), the sole top 100 S&T cluster within Latin America;
• Egypt (1), with Cairo (95th), the sole top 100 S&T cluster within Africa;
• India (4), with Bengaluru (56th), Delhi (63rd), Chennai (82nd) and Mumbai (84th);
• Islamic Republic of Iran (1), with Tehran (38th);
• Malaysia (2), with Kuala Lumpur (93rd) and its cross-border cluster shared with Singapore (33rd);
• Russian Federation (1), with Moscow (31st); and
• Türkiye (2), with Istanbul (59th) and Ankara (86th).
In other findings:
• China continues to lead with the most clusters (26) in the top 100, up from 24 clusters last year. Shenzhen–Hong Kong–Guangzhou (ranked 2nd globally) leads, followed by Beijing (3rd), Shanghai–Suzhou (5th) and Nanjing (9th).
• The US has 20 clusters among the top 100, followed by Germany with eight, and India and the Republic of Korea with four each. San Jose–San Francisco is the leading cluster for the US, Munich for Germany, Bengaluru for India, and Seoul for the Republic of Korea.
• The Cambridge cluster in the United Kingdom and San Jose–San Francisco in the US are the clusters with the most intensive S&T activity in proportion to population size, followed by Eindhoven (Netherlands), Oxford (UK), and Boston–Cambridge, MA (US).
• The GII 2024 also looks beyond the top 100 at the top 50 African S&T clusters. Egypt has the most clusters (11, with Cairo and Alexandria leading), followed by South Africa (8, with Johannesburg leading), and Morocco (5, with Rabat leading).
The GII science and technology clusters are one element in the larger Global Innovation Index (GII), which takes the pulse of the most recent trends in global innovation. The GII science and technology clusters identifies local concentrations of world-leading science and technology (S&T) activity around the globe, using a bottom-up approach. S&T clusters are established through the analysis of patent-filing activity and scientific article publication, documenting the geographical areas around the world with the highest density of inventors and scientific authors.
Two innovation metrics are employed in the compilation of the top 100 GII S&T clusters worldwide. The first metric focuses on the location of inventors listed in published patent applications under the WIPO Patent Cooperation Treat (PCT). The second metric considers the authors listed on published scientific articles.
WIPO locates and ranks science and technology clusters through a geocoding method, mapping addresses and names pulled from documents to a 96% accuracy.