The Global Innovation Index (GII) has ranked India as the 57th most innovative nation in the world. The country has improved its ranking from 60th position last year. India has been improving steadily since it was ranked 81st in 2015. Meanwhile, China improved its ranking from 22 in 2017 to 17 this year.
Innovation is now widely recognized as a central driver of economic growth and development. The Global Innovation Index (GII) aims to capture the multi-dimensional facets of innovation by providing a rich database of detailed metrics for 126 economies, which represent 90.8% of the world’s population and 96.3% of global GDP. Today a wide range of high-, medium-, and low-income countries are using the GII as a tool for action to improve innovation performance—often at the prime ministerial and ministerial level, and often with specific cross-ministerial task forces comprising a large variety of relevant innovation stakeholders. The GII 2018 marks the 11th edition of the GII, and the beginning of its second decade providing data and insights gathered from tracking innovation across the globe. The GII work contributes on two important fronts: By collecting innovation metrics, it assists countries to better assess their innovation performance; and by identifying strengths and challenges, it helps empower countries to improve their innovation policies by leveraging strengths and overcoming challenges. By pursuing these two objectives, the GII has helped to shape the innovation measurement and the innovation policy agenda of the countries it analyses. This year’s edition, The Global Innovation Index 2018: Energizing the World with Innovation, is dedicated to the theme of energy innovation. The GII 2018 analyses the energy innovation landscape of the next decade and identifies possible breakthroughs in fields such as energy production, storage, distribution, and consumption. It also looks at how breakthrough innovation occurs at the grassroots level and describes how small-scale renewable systems are on the rise. The GII is co-published by Cornell University, INSEAD, and the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), a specialized agency of the United Nations. The 2018 edition of the GII draws on the expertise of its Knowledge Partners: the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), PwC’s Strategy&, and the National Confederation of Industry (CNI) and Serviço Brasileiro de Apoio às Micro e Pequenas Empresas (Sebrae), as well as an Advisory Board of eminent international experts. For the eighth consecutive year, the Joint Research Centre (JRC) of the European Commission audited the GII calculations. The GII is concerned primarily with improving the journey towards a better way to measure and understand innovation and with identifying targeted policies and good practices that foster innovation.
