India's rank on the Global
Innovation Index (GII) has improved from 60th last year to 57th this year.
India has been consistently climbing the
GII ranking for the past two years. Its position improved from 80 in 2015 to 66 in 2016 after sliding for successive five years. This year's report shows that
India has been constantly outperforming on
innovation relative to its level of development for many years in a row. Positioning in the top half of the
GII ranking,
India ranks well in several important
innovation inputs, including graduates in science and engineering, expenditures of major R&D-intensive global companies, and capital formation.
Government and industry must synergise their efforts to promote R&D and innovation in the country.
NITI Aayog will join hands with CII to drive innovation in India. This was stated by Mr Ratan P Watal, Principal Adviser,
NITI Aayog & Member Secretary Economic Advisory Council to
Prime Minister at the India launch of
Global Innovation Index 2018 in
New Delhi on Wednesday.
Launching the index, Mr Watal said, The culture of spending on
research and development is growing in India and we are seeing the results in the form of improvements in rankings such as the GII. Taking a close look at this report also served another purpose - of providing an opportunity to look at examples from similar economies from across the world and understand how they effected change in their countries, he said.
Mr Naresh Prasad, Assistant Director General, World Intellectual Property Organization, said that GII enabled countries to compare their innovation performances and benchmark with others, he also added that WIPO would like to work with India to build its innovation ecosystem.
He thanked CII for its sustained work in driving innovation.
Switzerland, Netherlands, Sweden, the United Kingdom, Singapore, the
United States of America,
Finland and
Denmark lead the 2018 rankings in GII which saw a global launch last month at the
Cornell Tech campus in
New York. Co-published by
Cornell University,
Insead and WIPO, the GII acts as a source of insight into the multidimensional facets of innovation-driven growth. In 2018, the other partners of GII included PwC's Strategy &, the
National Industry Confederation (CNI) and
Brazilian Service of Support to Micro and
Small Enterprises (Sebrae).
Among the indicators of innovation outputs, India earns excellent positions in ICT services exports, where it ranks first in the world, and labour productivity growth, where it is 4th globally. India is 2nd among middle-income economies (after China) in the indicators that capture the quality of the innovation inputs and outputs. This year, its rankings are edging slightly closer to those of China, testifying the important efforts that the country is making in boosting innovation. In particular, the country ranks well in the quality of its scientific publication and local universities, because of higher scores for the
Indian Institute of Science Bangalore and the
Indian Institute of Technology. The GII indicators are grouped into innovation inputs and outputs. Innovation inputs capture the efforts made by the country to boost innovation. Innovation outputs measure the results of these efforts in terms of scientific publications, patents, trademarks, production, exports and other outputs.
