The 2018 Global Innovation Index Roundtable Meeting Held in Beijing
The 2018 "Global Innovation Index" Roundtable Meeting was held in Beijing on 11 July 2018. The meeting discussed the newly released global innovation index (GII) report co-published by Cornell University, INSEAD, and the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO).
This year's GII report focuses on the theme of "Energizing the World with Innovation". It 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 breakthrough innovation at the grassroots level and the trend of small-scale renewable systems.
The core of the GII Report consists of a ranking of 128 countries and economies' innovation capabilities and results measured by 80 indicators. This year China continued its climb up the GII rankings and moved up to 17th position, rendering it for the first time within the world's top 20 most innovative economies. As Sacha Wunsch-Vincent, head of Composite Indicator Research Section under Economics and Statistics Division of WIPO, pointed out while sharing his interpretation of the report at the meeting, there is still a huge gap separating the high- and middle-income economies from the low-income economies in the realm of innovation; and China is the only country that has achieved continual rise in the ranking, with its innovation outputs seeing a shift over the years from incremental increase in volume to enhancement of quality as well.
In analysing China's global ranking and its implication, another speaker Mr. Chen Hongbing, director of WIPO Office in China, attributed China's continued ascension to its unremitting efforts that lead to high rankings in the categories of human capital and research, infrastructure, market sophistication, business sophistication, knowledge and technology outputs, and creative outputs.
