Switzerland, UK the World’s Top 2 ‘Innovative Nations,’ Global Innovation Index Says

Switzerland, the U.K., Sweden, the Netherlands and the U.S. are the world’s five most “innovative nations,” according to the 2015 Global Innovation Index report released Thursday by the World Intellectual Property Organization, Cornell University and the French business school INSEAD. China, Malaysia, Vietnam, India, Jordan, Kenya and Uganda “are among a group of countries outperforming their economic peers,” the report said. The top 25 performers are all “high-income economies,” and the list “remains largely unchanged from past editions, illustrating that the leaders’ performance is hard to challenge for those that follow,” it said. The U.S. and the U.K. are two economies that “stand out” in terms of “innovation quality,” the report said, defining that as a measure of “university performance, the reach of scholarly articles and the international dimension of patent applications.” The U.S. and the U.K. “stay ahead of the pack, largely as a result of their world-class universities, closely followed by Japan, Germany and Switzerland,” it said. “Top-scoring middle-income economies on innovation quality are China, Brazil and India, with China increasingly outpacing the others.”