The 11th edition of the Global Innovation Index 2018 (GII), co-published by Cornell University, INSEAD, and the World Intellectual Property Organization, was released on July 10th. This year’s report showed Switzerland was still at the top overall, the United States dropped out of the top 5, Singapore had moved up two spots to fifth place and it had also explored how countries can vary in terms of innovation.

China broke into the world’s top 20 most-innovative countries for the first time – with a ranking of number 17 this year as the only middle-income economy in the GII. 

“We are not surprised to see quite a jump [of China’s ranking] this year from Number 22 to 17. I think it corresponds entirely with everything that we see about the performance of China in respective innovations,” said Francis Gurry, director general of the World Intellectual Property Organization.

Gurry confirmed the huge progress made by China’s “top-down driven policy setting which is a whole of  country effort.”

“This is a response to the strategic direction taken by the leadership, by all the institutions and all of the enterprises in China. As a consequence, we are seeing a structural change in the Chinese economy – away from the labor-intensive factories – and a move towards knowledge-intensive laboratories and institutions,” Gurry explained. 

Responding to Western countries’ criticism of China’s model of innovation, Gurry said “there is no absolutely right model,” listing the examples of Singapore and Japan who also have a top-down innovative model, and who both have performed successfully.

“I think other countries can actually learn from having strategic directions set at the top level while still allowing individual actors in the market place to choose whether they will or will not follow that direction… and they make their choice at their peril because there is a direction in the movement of science and technology which is inexorable,” Gurry added.

Talking about future trends, Gurry predicted with a certain amount of confidence that the trend would continue and China’s place would continue to rise.