Foreword 7

Acknowledgments 8

GII Advisory Committee 11

GII Industry Association Network 13

GII 2026 at a glance 14

Global leaders in innovation, 2026 15

Key takeaways 17

This year’s special GII theme looks to the future of science-powered entrepreneurship 24

Global Innovation Tracker 28

Global Innovation Tracker Dashboard 29

Key messages 30

Science and innovation investment 31

Technological progress 42

Technology adoption 45

Socioeconomic impact 48

Conclusion and outlook 51

Data notes 51

GII 2026 results 55

Who leads global innovation in 2026? 56

Who is gaining momentum? And who are the innovation climbers in 2026? 61

Which economies do more with less? 66

Where are innovation systems unbalanced? 70

What do regional patterns tell us about the geography of innovation? 76

Conclusion 82

GII 2026 Ranking of World’s Top 100 Innovation Clusters 83

Top 10 clusters and other top-tier rankings 84

Biggest rank movements among the top 100 86

Innovation clusters by economy 87

Regional distribution of innovation clusters 91

Top innovation-intensive clusters per capita 94

Scale versus intensity 98

Special theme 2026: Powering entrepreneurs at the frontier of science, turning pilots into pipelines 100

What is deep science entrepreneurship, why does it matter, and what is new? 101

How large and important is deep science entrepreneurship? 103

Obstacles to scaling deep science ventures 116

Deep science entrepreneurship in developing economies: building translation capacity where it matters most 117

What role does intellectual property play in deep science entrepreneurship? 120

What policies and practices can strengthen deep science entrepreneurship ecosystems? 126

Conclusion 129

GII 2026 Economy briefs and profiles 134

How to navigate the GII Innovation Ecosystems and Data Explorer 135

How to read the Economy profiles 136

Framework of the Global Innovation Index 2026 138

Appendix I – Conceptual and measurement framework of the Global Innovation Index 278

Rationale and origins 278

Defining innovation in the GII 278

The GII conceptual framework 279

Adjustments to the GII model in 2026 282

Data limitations and treatment 282

Missing values 283

Treatment of series with outliers 283

Normalization 284

Weights 284

Strengths and weaknesses 284

Caveats regarding the year-to-year comparison of rankings 285

Appendix II – Joint Research Centre (JRC) statistical audit of the 2026 Global Innovation Index 287

Introduction 287

Conceptual and statistical coherence within the GII framework 288

The impact of modeling assumptions on the GII results 296

Uncertainty analysis results 298

Sensitivity analysis results 304

Best-practice frontier in the GII by data envelopment analysis 307

Conclusion 310

Appendix III – Sources and definitions 313

1. Institutions 313

2. Human capital and research 315

3 Infrastructure 318

4. Market sophistication 321

5. Business sophistication 323

6. Knowledge and technology outputs 328

7. Creative outputs 332

Appendix IV – Global Innovation Index innovation cluster methodology 336

References 343

Appendix V – Methodology of the Special theme 344

1 The Dealroom–WIPO Deep Science Startup Tracker 344

2 Matching deep science startups to global patent data 346

References 348